Eigengrau: Poems 2015 to 2020

by Madison Scott-Clary

With topics ranging from gender to mental health, flower language to dogs, these five years worth of selected poems by Madison Scott-Clary represent some of her best works, now collected in to one book.

82 pages, Paperback

Published December 22, 2019

About the author

Madison Rye Progress, also writing under the name Madison Scott-Clary, is an author of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry living in the Pacific Northwest. Her interests lie in the realms of furry fiction and non-fiction, collaborative fiction, and hypertextual writing. She is a member of the Furry Writers' Guild, and editor for several projects, fiction and non-fiction. She holds an MFA from Cornell College where she studied the lyric essay and teaching creative writing in fandom- and subculture-specific spaces.

Reviews

[Jamie CULPON · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an unofficial review as I purchased a physical copy for a local queer library and know the author primarily through queer-focused poetry and comix events on the US West Coast. None of these comments are meant as academic or literary criticism of the poems due to my employment in information sciences and archival research and development projects within the United States of America, Japan, Canada, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and France. To the extent possible, I release this review to Goodreads under the BSD 3 clause license or the Creative Commons CC BY-SA-NC license as I am represented in literary matters by an AFL/CIO affiliated union. The author has previously edited or approved works of mine for publication as « J/K Perique ».

All that said: I fell in love with the author’s style and voice all over again by the third stanza. Their novel length works I really struggle with in terms of my ability to work through them at speed, since poetry and short fiction are much more in my « wheelhouse », in American English.

This is the kind of poetry collection I find myself in all too often, as a depicted character, a haunted spectre, a dream of shadows and flame, a spirit split and torn from space and time. The poems cry out for an infinite amount of reconsideration, drown in a mix of sorrow and joy, and make me think of the best little ditties by John M. Ford. If this is the kind of voice that my (practically 40 now) generation can produce, all I can say honestly is this: if I had more Hugo nominations to give, this collection would win. If I could vote twice in SFWA rules, I would. If I could convince a single editor who never read a single bit of « furry » poetry to grab this collection, maybe the « metagenre » of adult funny animal poems would get more traction in American Poetry collections.

But in the finest traditions of American Letters this collection, cover to cover, reminded me of one thing more than anything else: our words were inked in blood, slipstreamed out of time, and rejected by all the « right » people in every kind of professional process in the 90s. Want to know why « millennial » queer literature gets no respect?

Read Eigengrau and bask in the flames of our own worst memories.