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Hungry Constellations
The mutants of Wonderland threaten to smash through the looking glass as the river of Time overflows its banks. The King of Cats and the Queen of Wolves dance a duet across eons, alternately foes and lovers. Monstrous constellations come to life in the sky, hungry for people-filled worlds.
Hungry Constellations, the newest poetry collection from Nebula Award finalist and three-time Rhysling Award winner Mike Allen, surveys two decades of mind-bending verse. Editor Dominik Parisien starts with poems drawn from Allen’s previous book-length collections, Strange Wisdoms of the Dead (2006) and The Journey to Kailash (2008), then concludes the triptych with a selection of new and previously uncollected pieces, which author, poet and editor Amal El-Mohtar calls Allen’s most ambitious work to date in her introduction. Cover artist Paula Arwen Friedlander (arwendesigns.net) adroitly illustrations the collection’s Rhysling Award-nominated title poem.
Funded by a Kickstarter campaign, Hungry Constellations is Allen’s first poetry collection available in digital format.
From the introduction by Amal El-Mohtar:
“Let me tell you about Mike Allen’s poetry. This is a man who delights in breaking bodies: butchering, splitting, flaying, dismembering, then seeding landscapes with viscera until they too become bodies—bodies invaded, bodies stuffed, bodies contaminated. This is a man who carves words into and out of bodies, be they skin or sapphire, corpses or constellations. But somehow Allen skirts gore and clinical detachment both: there is a precision and an economy to his horror that’s reminiscent of clockwork, architecture, astronomy. Imagine a clock with bone-gears, a skin-tree growing liver-fruit, a ship knifing a face into the moon, and you’ll have something of a sense of what lies before you … Subterranean in conception and galactic in execution, this is a book of monsters.”
Praise for Mike Allen's poetry:
“Allen’s is poetry for goths of all ages … There is a long tradition of poetry dealing with the uncanny—think Keats’ ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ or Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’—and it’s nice to see someone putting it to such use again. Allen’s poems … do a fine job of making the human scary and the scary human.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Mike Allen pours everything he’s got onto his poem-canvases. Mythologies, science-fiction scenarios, private memories and desires, and untestable ideas crowd and overlay one another upon the pages as if flung from an overloaded brush. Here is a vividly vertiginous collection of poems, all fun and mind-games.”
—Fred Chappell
“Mike Allen is a poetic Shiva, whirling his thousand limbs to snatch gold from thin air and create these epics-in-miniature, each with its own metallic sheen.”
—Catherynne M. Valente
“In the great tradition of Clark Ashton Smith, Ray Bradbury and Ursula K. Le Guin, Mike Allen shows us how science fiction poetry can do what all first-rate poetry does—rouse the imagination to venture into darkness and the unknown, there to discover old truths and new delights.”
—R.H.W. Dillard
“Mike Allen’s poetry is sometimes amusing, often disturbing, but never disappointing. Certain passages get under your skin and call you back to read them again and again, each time to find new insights, hidden meanings whispered in allegorical phrase.
Hungry Constellations, the newest poetry collection from Nebula Award finalist and three-time Rhysling Award winner Mike Allen, surveys two decades of mind-bending verse. Editor Dominik Parisien starts with poems drawn from Allen’s previous book-length collections, Strange Wisdoms of the Dead (2006) and The Journey to Kailash (2008), then concludes the triptych with a selection of new and previously uncollected pieces, which author, poet and editor Amal El-Mohtar calls Allen’s most ambitious work to date in her introduction. Cover artist Paula Arwen Friedlander (arwendesigns.net) adroitly illustrations the collection’s Rhysling Award-nominated title poem.
Funded by a Kickstarter campaign, Hungry Constellations is Allen’s first poetry collection available in digital format.
From the introduction by Amal El-Mohtar:
“Let me tell you about Mike Allen’s poetry. This is a man who delights in breaking bodies: butchering, splitting, flaying, dismembering, then seeding landscapes with viscera until they too become bodies—bodies invaded, bodies stuffed, bodies contaminated. This is a man who carves words into and out of bodies, be they skin or sapphire, corpses or constellations. But somehow Allen skirts gore and clinical detachment both: there is a precision and an economy to his horror that’s reminiscent of clockwork, architecture, astronomy. Imagine a clock with bone-gears, a skin-tree growing liver-fruit, a ship knifing a face into the moon, and you’ll have something of a sense of what lies before you … Subterranean in conception and galactic in execution, this is a book of monsters.”
Praise for Mike Allen's poetry:
“Allen’s is poetry for goths of all ages … There is a long tradition of poetry dealing with the uncanny—think Keats’ ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ or Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’—and it’s nice to see someone putting it to such use again. Allen’s poems … do a fine job of making the human scary and the scary human.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Mike Allen pours everything he’s got onto his poem-canvases. Mythologies, science-fiction scenarios, private memories and desires, and untestable ideas crowd and overlay one another upon the pages as if flung from an overloaded brush. Here is a vividly vertiginous collection of poems, all fun and mind-games.”
—Fred Chappell
“Mike Allen is a poetic Shiva, whirling his thousand limbs to snatch gold from thin air and create these epics-in-miniature, each with its own metallic sheen.”
—Catherynne M. Valente
“In the great tradition of Clark Ashton Smith, Ray Bradbury and Ursula K. Le Guin, Mike Allen shows us how science fiction poetry can do what all first-rate poetry does—rouse the imagination to venture into darkness and the unknown, there to discover old truths and new delights.”
—R.H.W. Dillard
“Mike Allen’s poetry is sometimes amusing, often disturbing, but never disappointing. Certain passages get under your skin and call you back to read them again and again, each time to find new insights, hidden meanings whispered in allegorical phrase.
- GenresPoetry
166 pages, Kindle Edition
First published July 14, 2017
27 people want to read
About the author
Mike Allen
92 books155 followersMike Allen wears many creative hats, at least one of them tailor-made by his wife and partner-in-crime Anita.
An author, editor and publisher of science fiction, fantasy and horror, Mike has written, edited, or co-edited thirty-nine books, among them his forthcoming dark fantasy novel TRAIL OF SHADOWS, his sidearms, sorcery, and zombies sequence THE BLACK FIRE CONCERTO and THE GHOULMAKER’S ARIA, and his newest horror collection, SLOW BURN.
UNSEAMING and AFTERMATH OF AN INDUSTRIAL ACCIDENT, his first two volumes of horror tales, were both finalists for the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Story Collection, and his dark fable “The Button Bin” was a nominee for the Nebula Award for Best Short Story. Another collection, THE SPIDER TAPESTRIES, contains experiments in weird science fiction and fantasy.
As an editor and publisher, Mike has been nominated twice for the World Fantasy Award: first, for his anthology CLOCKWORK PHOENIX 5, the culmination of the Clockwork Phoenix series showcasing tales of beauty and strangeness that defy genre classification; and then, for MYTHIC DELIRIUM, the magazine of poetry and fiction he edited for twenty years.
He’s a three-time winner of the Rhysling Award for poetry. His six poetry collections include STRANGE WISDOMS OF THE DEAD, a Philadelphia Inquirer Editor’s Choice selection, and HUNGRY CONSTELLATIONS, a Suzette Haden Elgin Award nominee.
With Anita, he runs Mythic Delirium Books, based in Roanoke, Virginia. Their cat Pandora assists.
An author, editor and publisher of science fiction, fantasy and horror, Mike has written, edited, or co-edited thirty-nine books, among them his forthcoming dark fantasy novel TRAIL OF SHADOWS, his sidearms, sorcery, and zombies sequence THE BLACK FIRE CONCERTO and THE GHOULMAKER’S ARIA, and his newest horror collection, SLOW BURN.
UNSEAMING and AFTERMATH OF AN INDUSTRIAL ACCIDENT, his first two volumes of horror tales, were both finalists for the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Story Collection, and his dark fable “The Button Bin” was a nominee for the Nebula Award for Best Short Story. Another collection, THE SPIDER TAPESTRIES, contains experiments in weird science fiction and fantasy.
As an editor and publisher, Mike has been nominated twice for the World Fantasy Award: first, for his anthology CLOCKWORK PHOENIX 5, the culmination of the Clockwork Phoenix series showcasing tales of beauty and strangeness that defy genre classification; and then, for MYTHIC DELIRIUM, the magazine of poetry and fiction he edited for twenty years.
He’s a three-time winner of the Rhysling Award for poetry. His six poetry collections include STRANGE WISDOMS OF THE DEAD, a Philadelphia Inquirer Editor’s Choice selection, and HUNGRY CONSTELLATIONS, a Suzette Haden Elgin Award nominee.
With Anita, he runs Mythic Delirium Books, based in Roanoke, Virginia. Their cat Pandora assists.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 28, 2015
Startlingly brilliant.
Mike Allen is part of the renaissance going on in SF poetry right now. His imagery and ideas are wonderful, if sometimes edging on too horrific for me. A really great collection.
Mike Allen is part of the renaissance going on in SF poetry right now. His imagery and ideas are wonderful, if sometimes edging on too horrific for me. A really great collection.
June 1, 2016
"Science fiction poetry sings castrati songs,
whines wistfully for stars and princesses fair
but cowers from stalking unexplored plateaus,
tearing alien throats and eating unknown flesh,
losing its chance to **** like mad and leave
crying children in the nooks of every timeline."
I don't entirely understand what just happened to my brain but I know I like it. Certainly Mike Allen stalks unexplored plateaus, tears throats, eats flesh and ****s like mad.
Allen's been on my radar for a while, for his prose, his editing and in this case his poetry. Hungry Constellations was not a bad place to start, being a Kickstarter-funded project to bring his poetry to ebook format for the first time. Here we have a curated selection (edited by Dominik Parisien) of his earlier works as well as new and uncollected poems. A paperback is also available, incidentally.
As with Ligotti's Death Poems earlier this year, I'm dipping my toe in the poetical waters without being qualified to offer a meaningful opinion as yet. Nonetheless I can tell this is a collection I'll want to return to as my knowledge grows, so as to place it under the microscope of further contemplation.
Certainly it's a different ballgame to Ligotti's spartan and minimalist work. This is a cornucopia of weird/sci-fi/horror themes, with healthy lashings of Greek mythological influence (including particular emphasis on Charon and Sisyphus) plus musings on great painters like Picasso. There's also some unconventional text arrangements including upside-down type and so forth.
In other words it's got a touch of 'House of Leaves' about it, especially with the poem 'Momentum' that features three lines of text snaking towards a single concluding word. To me it's all quite experimental and confronting to my expectations but then I couldn't say how common such things are in the field.
What matters is that it's bursting at the seams with imagination, and the language is frequently both beautiful and brutal. I believe it would be of interest to any fan of these themes in prose who finds themselves curious to see them explored in poetic form.
whines wistfully for stars and princesses fair
but cowers from stalking unexplored plateaus,
tearing alien throats and eating unknown flesh,
losing its chance to **** like mad and leave
crying children in the nooks of every timeline."
I don't entirely understand what just happened to my brain but I know I like it. Certainly Mike Allen stalks unexplored plateaus, tears throats, eats flesh and ****s like mad.
Allen's been on my radar for a while, for his prose, his editing and in this case his poetry. Hungry Constellations was not a bad place to start, being a Kickstarter-funded project to bring his poetry to ebook format for the first time. Here we have a curated selection (edited by Dominik Parisien) of his earlier works as well as new and uncollected poems. A paperback is also available, incidentally.
As with Ligotti's Death Poems earlier this year, I'm dipping my toe in the poetical waters without being qualified to offer a meaningful opinion as yet. Nonetheless I can tell this is a collection I'll want to return to as my knowledge grows, so as to place it under the microscope of further contemplation.
Certainly it's a different ballgame to Ligotti's spartan and minimalist work. This is a cornucopia of weird/sci-fi/horror themes, with healthy lashings of Greek mythological influence (including particular emphasis on Charon and Sisyphus) plus musings on great painters like Picasso. There's also some unconventional text arrangements including upside-down type and so forth.
In other words it's got a touch of 'House of Leaves' about it, especially with the poem 'Momentum' that features three lines of text snaking towards a single concluding word. To me it's all quite experimental and confronting to my expectations but then I couldn't say how common such things are in the field.
What matters is that it's bursting at the seams with imagination, and the language is frequently both beautiful and brutal. I believe it would be of interest to any fan of these themes in prose who finds themselves curious to see them explored in poetic form.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews