Distillations:
Speculative Poetry Review
Like fine spirits, poetry is formed in a process of distilling the truths from the world around us. It can be heady stuff, especially when the subjects are not limited to this world, or this reality. Join Jennifer Mercer each month for a shot of the newest, the oldest, and the oddest.
Distillations: Explorations of Hunger
In this month’s Distillations column, we explore three poems involving different twists on the mundane experience of eating and the experience of hunger. The narrators in each poem are human, and the food being discussed is not particularly exotic: risotto, soufflés, and mother’s milk. However, each poem shows hunger from an unexpected direction.
Continue ReadingDistillations: Visions of Time
Around here, March is when spring starts making its tentative appearance. If fall and winter are about remembering the past, spring is all about the future. In many ways, this idea of change is where science fiction began. What will happen next? What will the world be like if X happens? What will […]
Continue ReadingDistillations: Scifaiku
Even during a leap year, February is the shortest month. For this month’s column, we will explore the haiku form, which is short by design. Unlike the miserable cold of February (at least for those in the northern hemisphere), haiku is delightful. Everything unnecessary has been pared away. All that remains are the seventeen syllables, […]
Continue ReadingDistillations: Assonance
This month we continue our exploration of poetry techniques with assonance, defined as the repetition of vowel sounds. Last month, I referred to assonance as “alliteration’s crafty cousin.” The reason for this is that assonance is much less visually obvious. Although the English language is quite free with the correspondence of spelling to sound, this […]
Continue ReadingDistillations: Alliteration
As I mentioned last month, this column will be exploring various poetry techniques each month and how they are used in current speculative poetry. This month’s featured technique is alliteration, which is defined as the repetition of initial consonants or consonant sounds. It is a simple technique which can be powerful if not overdone. It […]
Continue ReadingDistillations: Imagery
For many people, poetry is a strange new land, as bizarre as any landscape imagined by Tolkien, Heinlein, or in extreme cases, Lovecraft. As the number of poetry reviewers at The Fix grows, I will be taking some time each month to discuss the mechanics of poetry. This guide will not make the landscape any […]
Continue ReadingDistillations: An Introduction
Welcome to Distillations, a monthly review of Speculative Poetry. The field of Speculative Poetry embraces every subgenre of science fiction and fantasy imaginable in every existing poetry form, plus some made up fresh for the occasion. What it doesn’t include is a lot of words. That means that every letter, every piece of punctuation, […]
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