Elegies of Rotting Stars

by Tiffany Morris

A dark poetry collection.

Genres: Poetry, Horror, Indigenous

60 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 1, 2022

About the author

Tiffany Morris is an L’nu’skw (Mi’kmaw) writer from Nova Scotia. She is the author of the swampcore horror novella Green Fuse Burning (Stelliform Books, 2023) and the Elgin-nominated horror poetry collection Elegies of Rotting Stars (Nictitating Books, 2022). Her work has appeared in the Indigenous horror anthology Never Whistle At Night, as well as in Nightmare Magazine, Uncanny Magazine, and Apex Magazine, among others. She has an MA in English with a focus on Indigenous Futurisms and apocalyptic literature.

Reviews

[Stephanie M. Wytovich · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was exceptional, beautiful, interstellar. Trust that if Tiffany Morris puts out a poetry collection, I'm 100% reading it. Don't miss this one.

[Zaynab]

I don’t really read a lot of poetry but this is a book that I think benefits from sitting on the shelf for a while as a reference to return to.

Highlights for me were:

here, have some ghost stories

and

this love letter will self destruct

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tiffany Morris killed my faith in civilization.

[Ash · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 - fascinating and I want explore more of this genre

[Lynne · Rating 5 out of 5]

A stunning collection that engages with the environment, modernity, colonialism, and horror in inventive and enlightening ways. Loved the use of the Mi'kmaq language throughout and the author's note at the end on how it's meant to be read. Favourite poems included: Re-Wilding under those conditions, Ossuary Aria, If, Then, and Here, Have some Ghost Stories.

[J Kuria · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

Seraphantast
Self/Destruct
Born of the Elements
How Softly The Earth Swallowed Us
In The Distance
Possession
There Are No Simple Hymns

...&more.

[Sara Tantlinger · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this stunning collection to pieces. Tiffany Morris has such a powerful voice; I highly recommend picking up this beautiful, haunting, and thoughtful collection. It's a great addition to the world of poetry.

[Lady Jane Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

Haunting and eloquent.

[Patrick Barb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another great horror poetry collection out this year. This one is bursting with life, a ripe abundance of horrors of bodies human and heavenly.

[Amanda Butler · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read “Never Whistle at Night” a couple months ago, and one of the stories was written by Tiffany Morris. Her bio mentioned horror poetry, and I immediately had to get it. This collection is absolute craft. The wordsmithing of this collection is both enrapturing and gruesome.

My favorite line from the poem “In This Necromancy of Cosmos”: “Formaldehyde reverie/spelled in withered shadow:/the sky blackened sulphuric/canticle in the ventricle in/fungal fugue.”

[Michael Adams · Rating 5 out of 5]

The language in these poems is both exquisite and horrific. Omens of a dying world already haunted by the terrible things we do. Partly post-apocalyptic, partly mid-catastrophe, partly confessional, Morris has a gift with words, twisting and weaving threads of the natural and man-made worlds together into a poison-tipped barbed wire. These poems draw blood and leave their venom behind.

[Madison McSweeney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Equally engaging in imagery and rhythm, these poems are densely packed with vivid, apocalyptic language, creating a sensation of different worlds (human and natural, real and potential) colliding.


I loved this book and will definitely revisit it.

[Rebecca MacDonald · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book of poetry I will re-read many times. Worlds of and beyond ours described in language that is a force. Words I never knew but when I looked them up, helped me better feel what was being created. The whole book seems to be located in a liminal space, and you can find yourself in there.

[Marisca Pichette · Rating 5 out of 5]

Visceral, snow-swept, defiant. Each poem has a captivating rhythm and sharp end, with beautiful use of language. My personal favorites are: “Here, Have Some Ghost Stories,” “This is Where There is Nothing,” and “Re-Wilding Under Those Conditions.”

[Kai Stanciu · Rating 5 out of 5]

That’s it, it finally happened, I gave a poetry book 5*. Usually I’m bothered by the fact that I don’t understand every metaphor and symbol perfectly without the context and that makes poetry more difficult to get into for me, but this was so beautiful I can’t give it any less. Amazing.

[Shinyfluff · Rating 5 out of 5]

a gothically lush, dark collection of Horror poetry infused with the author's Mi’kmaq language. the way its used is powerful and beautiful. just an amazing collection, highly recommend!

[Mox Mackie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful and tragic, haunting and heartbreaking. I keep coming back to this collection over and over again.

[Halfdime · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Every carapace is a cage of hardened hope”.

[Andrei88 · Rating 2 out of 5]

I felt that it started out strong and fiddled out later on, I wanted to give it 3 stars, then headed into 2.5, yet the final part had me settling on 2 stars.

[H.V. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Elegies of Rotting Stars grabs you by the ear and heart and demands your attention. Morris combines bewitching language with warnings about the on-going dangers of colonialism to create a truly extraordinary collection.

We extracted a star from entrails,

stepped forward and threw

it all into the mouth of heaven:

love is not always a gift

blood is not always a sacrifice

~ “Dririmancy”

Morris unifies her collection with overarching themes including: ecological concerns, anti-colonialism, forgetting, and death. I love how she handles forgetting, positioning it as both a danger when we willfully don’t learn from the past and a way of wiping the slate clean. I also love how these poems engage with the death, dissolution, and decay of everything, including the reader and narrator. In some poems, such as “Possession”, all of these themes crash together in a beautiful wave, reminding us how small we are in the vastness of time and existence.

Morris demonstrates an absolute mastery of language and sound in her writing. Her imagery is vivid. I particularly enjoy her use of stars and burning, showing how fire is paradoxically both destructive and also a source of renewal. She revels in alliteration, sometimes sprinkling it in and other times weaving together long, elegant strings of alliterative phrases, such as in the remarkable, “If, Then”. I recommend reading these poems aloud to feel their full impact.

“If…

Every denouement is a devastation

of once-promised grace

Every equinox is an elegy

of rotting stars

Every flag is a framework

of surfeit collapse

Every gestation is a gesture

of appended horror…”

~ “If, Then”

Many poems in Elegies incorporate Mi’kmaq words alongside their italicized, English translations. In her afterword, Morris talks about this choice, saying: “this act emphasizes Mi’kmaq in the sentence and places it in the same terrain as the English text used predominantly in the poem. This decenters English as default and resists the impulse to objectify or ‘other’ the presence of Mi’kmaq” (60). If you’re interested in learning more about “apocalypse ecopoetics” (an apt description for many of the poems in Elegies) and intentionally decolonizing our thinking, check out Morris’s essay, Decolonizing the Apocalypse through Etuaptmumk in The Ex-Puritan. You can learn more about Mi’kmaq on Mi’kmaq Online.

I destroyed my fear of death

by obliterating the future, the

asynchronous sequencing of its fractal

gray, temtestoq, fragmented hours.

Yet pejipug, winter still arrives,

a blunt object resounding

on a soft surface.

~ “Possession”

I found that reading words in Mi’kmaq, a language unfamiliar to me, alongside my native English changed how I engaged with these poems. I read more slowly and paid more attention to the feeling of the words and syllables, especially in poems such as “We Are Born Devouring” and “Re-Wilding Under These Conditions” which are structured to be read multiple ways. I felt actively engaged in Morris’s process of reclaiming language and her warning for the future: if we can’t learn to perceive the world in new ways and from a multiplicity of viewpoints, we may not survive.

Elegies of Rotting Stars is a beautiful and vital collection. Morris will simultaneously break you open and pull the disparate parts of you together. I highly recommend Elegies to any fans of dark speculative poetry.