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Double Visions
In Double Visions, SFPA Grandmaster Poet Bruce Boston collaborates with ten other poets, including fellow Grandmaster Robert Frazier, Bram Stoker Award winner Marge Simon, and Asimov's Readers' Award winner G. O. Clark. Includes seven Rhysling nominees, the winner of the Odyssey Poetry Award, and the winner of the Locus Online Poetry Poll for Best All-Time SF, Fantasy, or Horror Poem.
"Double Visions explores and articulates the alien countryside that lies just behind the façade of ordinary existence and examines the elusive, fleeting shadows where fundamental truths reside. I came away from this collection with an enhanced appreciation for the richness, strangeness, horror, delight, and utter beauty of our kind's brief sojourn in the cosmos." - from the introduction by J. L. Comeau
"Double Visions explores and articulates the alien countryside that lies just behind the façade of ordinary existence and examines the elusive, fleeting shadows where fundamental truths reside. I came away from this collection with an enhanced appreciation for the richness, strangeness, horror, delight, and utter beauty of our kind's brief sojourn in the cosmos." - from the introduction by J. L. Comeau
66 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 6, 2013
17 people want to read
About the author
Bruce Boston
352 books117 followersI've published more than sixty books and chapbooks, including the novels Stained Glass Rain and the best-of fiction collection Masque of Dreams. My work ranges from broad humor to literary surrealism, with many stops along the way for science fiction, fantasy, and horror. My novel The Guardener's Tale (Sam's Dot, 2007) was a Bram Stoker Award Finailist and a Prometheus Award Nominee. My stories and poems have appeared in hundreds of publications, including Asimov's SF Magazine, Amazing Stories, Weird Tales, Strange Horizons, Realms of Fantasy, Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, and The Nebula Awards Showcase, and received a number of awards, most notably, a Pushcart Prize, the Bram Stoker Award, the Asimov's Readers' Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Grand Master Award of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. For more information, please visit my website at http://www.bruceboston.com/
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 27, 2010
Double Visions by Bruce Boston with fellow poets
2009, Dark Regions Press, ISBN 1-88893-66-9
66 pages - $7.95 paperback
Bruce Boston’s latest volume of poetry from ‘Dark Regions Press’ Double Visions is a beautifully haunting, enchantingly soul-stirring collection of twenty-one collaborative inspirations that feed the head while whispering vast and secret wonders to the heart. Here literary master Bruce Boston teams up with ten of today’s foremost speculative poets to create a fantastical array of fully realized, oft times frightening, mindscapes brimming with mythic splendor and bizarre horrors alike. On the whole these are acutely insightful works that display an intimate understanding of spiritual longing, loneliness, and the human condition at large – they are deeply layered with meanings less tangible that speak to the reader on a variety of subtle levels.
Most of the poems in Double Visions made there debut during the late 80s, 90s and early part of this decade, appearing in top speculative publications such as Amazing Stories, Strange Horizons, Dreams and Nightmares as well as over half a dozen Rhysling Award Anthologies. Three appear in print here for the first time, including a stylishly ghoulish seasonal poem entitled Carnival of Ghosts with Marge Simon (who also contributes a work of art) that captures the “spirit” of Halloween most aptly. It tells the woeful tale of an annual All Hallows Eve haunting of regretful, reminiscent souls.
“Our harsh laughter
spills into the alley
along with dusk.
Regret hangs like fog
above the raucous sounds:
a rush of sins
without redemption
from memory’s grave.”
Many of the poems in Double Visions are profoundly psychological in nature, some being deeply introverted. To Dance With Shiva, with David Hunter Sutherland, is an intense, robustly visual piece that forecasts what benefits the future of virtual reality could hold for us in the field of psychotherapy if the technology were to be developed as a constructive therapeutic tool. The Web, with Gary William Crawford, is a brief, savagely brooding work of gothic free-verse that intimately explores the horrors of mental illness. It describes being systematically destroyed by ones own personal demons: monsters born of, and perpetuated by, the illness. The Web is one of three works with Mr. Crawford that appear in this volume. All take place in the mythical “Shadow City”, an ebon metropolis of surreal nightmare where madness is the order of the day and shame has become an art form.
Within these pages you will also explore a dangerous primordial terrain of lunatic mysteries through a trio of gorgeously lurid works on the fictional “Mutant Rain Forest” with fellow Grand Master Award recipient Robert Frazier. Included in this set is the mesmerizing masterwork Return to the Mutant Rain Forest, which won the Odyssey Poetry Award in 1988 along with several other well deserved accolades. In addition, you will behold a blasted post-holocaustic nuclear landscape of ultra-vivid cybernetic horror in an unapologetically bleak future vision word-picture entitled Holocaustic Museum Fragments for Binary Extrapolation, with t. winter-damon. Also with the same poet, We Find Ourselves on Mars gazing sunward at a dead world we once called home.
However dark and grim Double Visions may at times appear, it is not without a sense of macabre humor and irony.
Consider Unextinctions, with Roger Dutcher, where nature plays a mirthful jape on humanity. Here long extinct species begin reappearing around the globe in mass to create all variety of mayhem.
“The tabloids have a field day,
a chance to report the truth…”
Shortly after this, man’s ancient ancestors start showing up in numbers way too large to control.
“Hirsute and filthy,
clad only in uncured skins,
they wander down from the hills
or in across the prairies
to prowl our neighborhoods,
to invade our finest malls
and shatter our plate glass,
to crouch upon our fenders
and fiercely pummel our hoods.”
Double Visions takes a decidedly zany turn at Shades and Illuminations, with G. O. Clark. This is a singularly quirky poem with an uncanny wit that explores the mysteries of the light bulb and lamp shade. Each separate verse offers a different parable or truism which features the aforementioned objects predominantly in its oratory. The poem teaches us (along with several other odd and dubious facts) that…
“Commandants of the Third Rich
Fashioned lampshades from cured human
Skins, imparting a warm and fleshly
Glow to their reading pleasures.”
All in all Double Visions is a spell binding collection of masterfully articulated horrors and wonders: wise, profound, and mind-expanding. It is well worth getting to know.
(Review by Anthony Bernstein. It is posted with permission from Star Line where it first appears in print, Sept/Oct 2009 issue.)
2009, Dark Regions Press, ISBN 1-88893-66-9
66 pages - $7.95 paperback
Bruce Boston’s latest volume of poetry from ‘Dark Regions Press’ Double Visions is a beautifully haunting, enchantingly soul-stirring collection of twenty-one collaborative inspirations that feed the head while whispering vast and secret wonders to the heart. Here literary master Bruce Boston teams up with ten of today’s foremost speculative poets to create a fantastical array of fully realized, oft times frightening, mindscapes brimming with mythic splendor and bizarre horrors alike. On the whole these are acutely insightful works that display an intimate understanding of spiritual longing, loneliness, and the human condition at large – they are deeply layered with meanings less tangible that speak to the reader on a variety of subtle levels.
Most of the poems in Double Visions made there debut during the late 80s, 90s and early part of this decade, appearing in top speculative publications such as Amazing Stories, Strange Horizons, Dreams and Nightmares as well as over half a dozen Rhysling Award Anthologies. Three appear in print here for the first time, including a stylishly ghoulish seasonal poem entitled Carnival of Ghosts with Marge Simon (who also contributes a work of art) that captures the “spirit” of Halloween most aptly. It tells the woeful tale of an annual All Hallows Eve haunting of regretful, reminiscent souls.
“Our harsh laughter
spills into the alley
along with dusk.
Regret hangs like fog
above the raucous sounds:
a rush of sins
without redemption
from memory’s grave.”
Many of the poems in Double Visions are profoundly psychological in nature, some being deeply introverted. To Dance With Shiva, with David Hunter Sutherland, is an intense, robustly visual piece that forecasts what benefits the future of virtual reality could hold for us in the field of psychotherapy if the technology were to be developed as a constructive therapeutic tool. The Web, with Gary William Crawford, is a brief, savagely brooding work of gothic free-verse that intimately explores the horrors of mental illness. It describes being systematically destroyed by ones own personal demons: monsters born of, and perpetuated by, the illness. The Web is one of three works with Mr. Crawford that appear in this volume. All take place in the mythical “Shadow City”, an ebon metropolis of surreal nightmare where madness is the order of the day and shame has become an art form.
Within these pages you will also explore a dangerous primordial terrain of lunatic mysteries through a trio of gorgeously lurid works on the fictional “Mutant Rain Forest” with fellow Grand Master Award recipient Robert Frazier. Included in this set is the mesmerizing masterwork Return to the Mutant Rain Forest, which won the Odyssey Poetry Award in 1988 along with several other well deserved accolades. In addition, you will behold a blasted post-holocaustic nuclear landscape of ultra-vivid cybernetic horror in an unapologetically bleak future vision word-picture entitled Holocaustic Museum Fragments for Binary Extrapolation, with t. winter-damon. Also with the same poet, We Find Ourselves on Mars gazing sunward at a dead world we once called home.
However dark and grim Double Visions may at times appear, it is not without a sense of macabre humor and irony.
Consider Unextinctions, with Roger Dutcher, where nature plays a mirthful jape on humanity. Here long extinct species begin reappearing around the globe in mass to create all variety of mayhem.
“The tabloids have a field day,
a chance to report the truth…”
Shortly after this, man’s ancient ancestors start showing up in numbers way too large to control.
“Hirsute and filthy,
clad only in uncured skins,
they wander down from the hills
or in across the prairies
to prowl our neighborhoods,
to invade our finest malls
and shatter our plate glass,
to crouch upon our fenders
and fiercely pummel our hoods.”
Double Visions takes a decidedly zany turn at Shades and Illuminations, with G. O. Clark. This is a singularly quirky poem with an uncanny wit that explores the mysteries of the light bulb and lamp shade. Each separate verse offers a different parable or truism which features the aforementioned objects predominantly in its oratory. The poem teaches us (along with several other odd and dubious facts) that…
“Commandants of the Third Rich
Fashioned lampshades from cured human
Skins, imparting a warm and fleshly
Glow to their reading pleasures.”
All in all Double Visions is a spell binding collection of masterfully articulated horrors and wonders: wise, profound, and mind-expanding. It is well worth getting to know.
(Review by Anthony Bernstein. It is posted with permission from Star Line where it first appears in print, Sept/Oct 2009 issue.)
Read
July 7, 2010The poems collected in Double Visions range not only in form and meter, but in subject matter and content. Bruce Boston has chosen a fantastic group of poets with whom to collaborate to create some amazingly beautiful poetry. Several of the poems contained in Double Visions have been published elsewhere, with many of these having been nominated for the Rhysling Award (a science fiction poetry award). One particular poem, “Return to the Mutant Rain Forest”, won the Odyssey Poetry Award in 1988 and Locus Online Poetry Poll in 2006. This particular poem can also be found in the Year’s Best Horror XVIII and the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror III, both published in 1990. Double Visions also includes three original poems appearing for the first time.
J.L. Comeau provides a lyrical and beautiful introduction for Double Visions, which captures the essence of the forthcoming poetry. However, it is rather lengthy when compared to the actual length of the book, and one particular paragraph discussing President Obama’s inauguration seems forced and out of context with the rest of the introduction. Twenty-one poems written by Boston in collaboration with other poets appear following the introduction. The poetry contained in Double Visions is haunting with hints of the bizarre, the fantastical, and the horrific, with mayhem and madness ensuing. Each reader will find their own individual hidden meanings within the poetry as it speaks to the human condition through humor, sadness, wit, and remorse. Topics range from All Hallows Eve to post-apocalyptic wastelands, and the further into the book you read, the darker and scarier the poetry becomes.
Double Visions includes author profiles at the end of the book, a nice (and welcome) addition. The profiles are brief, only a paragraph each, but provide avenues to explore the poets’ works further, and display the breadth of experience contained within the pages of the book.
Double Visions would make a nice addition to both a horror collection and a poetry collection in a public library.
Review by Kelly Fann
J.L. Comeau provides a lyrical and beautiful introduction for Double Visions, which captures the essence of the forthcoming poetry. However, it is rather lengthy when compared to the actual length of the book, and one particular paragraph discussing President Obama’s inauguration seems forced and out of context with the rest of the introduction. Twenty-one poems written by Boston in collaboration with other poets appear following the introduction. The poetry contained in Double Visions is haunting with hints of the bizarre, the fantastical, and the horrific, with mayhem and madness ensuing. Each reader will find their own individual hidden meanings within the poetry as it speaks to the human condition through humor, sadness, wit, and remorse. Topics range from All Hallows Eve to post-apocalyptic wastelands, and the further into the book you read, the darker and scarier the poetry becomes.
Double Visions includes author profiles at the end of the book, a nice (and welcome) addition. The profiles are brief, only a paragraph each, but provide avenues to explore the poets’ works further, and display the breadth of experience contained within the pages of the book.
Double Visions would make a nice addition to both a horror collection and a poetry collection in a public library.
Review by Kelly Fann
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews