Vectors: A Week In The Death of A Planet

by Charlee Jacob, Marge Simon

"I wrote the original poetry for Vectors during the first seven days of July, 2006, while sicker than usual and unable to get out of bed, somehow imagining there was no one else out there. There will always be those who think the idea too far fetched, that humanity could never destroy itself so utterly, especially in only one week. Yet these poems by Marge Simon and myself were never about science's purest ground zero but about all our planet's brethren, reduced to hearts and numbers." --Charlee Jacob

Genres: Poetry

90 pages, Paperback

First published May 15, 2007

About the author

Charlee Jacob has been a digger for dinosaur bones, a seller of designer rags, and a cook - to mention only a few things. With more than 950 publishing credits, Charlee has been writing dark poetry and prose for more than 25 years. Some of her recent publishing events include the novel STILL (Necro), the poetry collection HERESY (Necro), and the novel DARK MOODS. She is a three-time Bram Stoker Award winner, two of those awards for her novel DREAD IN THE BEAST and the poetry collection SINEATER; the third award for collaborative poetry collection, VECTORS, with Marge Simon. Permanently disabled, she has begun to paint as one of her forms of phsycial therapy. She lives in Irving, Texas with her husband Jim and a plethora of felines.

Courtesy: http://www.williamcookwriter.com

Reviews

[Max Ingram · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an extremely interesting book, more so for its concept than its ultimate execution. Vectors, also co-written by Marge Simon, pulls together an eclectic collection of poems which, taken altogether, tell the story of an apocalypse in the making. Each piece is a small vignette, telling one micro-story amid an immense tapestry of the earth (or rather mankind himself) being destroyed by biochemical means. We're talking plague, disease, and the subsequent disintegration of human society.

If I examine each individual piece, many of the poems here fell short for me, but when taken altogether, the story at large was downright unforgettable. I'd highly recommend this book, if for no other reason than to see what can be done with this kind of high-concept.

[Monster]

The subtitle for this poetry collection is "A Week in the Death of a Planet", and that's an apt description. The reader follows a plague that destroys life on Earth in seven days. It starts on July 1, and covers each day of the plague through July 7.
Some of the poems are by Ms. Jacob, some by Ms. Simon, and some written by both. Some of the poems carry the story forward, showing us the trajectory of the plague that is destroying the world, while some of the poems simply show us slice of life pictures; bits of the overall devastation. As the plague sweeps across the globe, and people become more frightened and desperate, the poetry gets darker and more terrifying.
Personally, I found Simon's style cleaner and easier to read than Jacob's. Ms. Jacob seems to take a more "esoteric" route in her writing here. Not a bad thing, just a different style of poetry. In the poems they wrote together, no single style overshadows the other; it almost seems as if a third writer has joined in. While there were a few poems that felt like filler, the majority worked quite well at depicting a world sliding into a ruin. It is a horrifying prospect, humanity destroying humanity in one short week, and the authors pull no punches.
Vectors is not a perfect collection, but it is a collection worth reading, and worthy of library and private collections.
Contains: dark images
Reviewed by Erik Smith