Creep & Crow

by Marc Ruvolo, Alien Buddha

For decades, Marc Ruvolo has been an outgoing, writerly sage of songs, stories, and poems, like an outlier in a punk subculture overflowing with edgy misanthropes, boilerplate fanzine prose makers, and mouthy anti-intellectuals. That is, despite the milieu, he has carved a dedication to language and ideas (both down home and otherworldly), inquisition and wordplay too. He has also walked the tensile tightrope between humor, irony, history, jest, politics, sexuality, insight, commentary, and vision with unfettered aplomb. While his lyrics bite hard, his poems are free-floating at times but situational in others; they become suffused with both a sense of science fiction and surrealism, dark folklore and literary alchemy, and he never backs down from his flights of fancy. In his debut chapbook Creep & Crow (Alien Buddha Press 2022) he turns a domestic home into the realm of entrapment, a soccer game into a Witch haven, tumbling grackles into a land of omens, an errant visitor into cargo cult legendary, and he lets readers ride the sun's yellow highway. Each is exquisitely rendered with gritty detail, elastic fantasy, and impressive emotional landscapes, all prepared with granular attention for our jaded eyes. I am lucky to have tasted it.

--David Ensminger,
Author of Visual Vitriol
(University Press of Mississippi, 2011)

39 pages, Paperback

Published February 17, 2022

About the author

Marc Ruvolo (he/him) is a queer writer and musician living in Portland, Oregon who once considered himself a punk. He founded the seminal Bucket O’ Blood book store in Chicago, and his poetry and fiction have appeared in Baffling Magazine (Neon Hemlock), Slay and Slay Again: A Queer Horror Anthology, and Cynthia Pelayo’s “Gothic Blue Book” series. He’s published three horror novellas, “SLOE,” in 2023 by Unnerving Books, “WASTE GROUND” by Slashic Horror Press in 2025, and “PIETIES: EXPANDED EDITION,” by Slashic Horror in April 26. Find him on Bluesky at @marcruvolo.bsky.social.

Reviews

[Kevin Dunn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant! Poems that are dark and powerful, funny and forceful. Big punch in a little book. Great stuff.