“ ‘I will do such things,’ King Lear shouts before the storm, “What they are, yet I know not: but they shall be / The terrors of the earth.”

Drawing upon Edmund Burke’s definition of the sublime—the odd beauty associated with fear and self-preservation; our astonished delight in what destroys, what overpowers and compels us toward darkness—these strange poems mine the sinister fault lines between weird fiction, expressionism, gothic horror, and notions of the absurd, cracking the mundane shell of our given metaphysical order. In the traditions of Nerval, Trakl, Schulz, Tadić, Poe, and contemporaries Aase Berg and Jeff VanderMeer, the wonderful disassociation brought to bear on the reader lies in the conjuring of unprecedented worlds, their myths and logics, their visions and transformations—worlds that resist interpretation almost successfully, and reveal to us the uncanny and nightmarish. “ - back cover

Joe Fletcher is the author of the full-length collection, The Hatch (Brooklyn Arts Press) and three chapbooks: Kola Superdeep Borehole (Bateau Press), Already It Is Dusk (Brooklyn Arts Press) and Sleigh Ride (Factory Hollow Press). Other work of his can be found at jubilat, Octopus, Slope, Gulf Coast, Painted Bride Quarterly, Hollins Critic, Puerto del Sol, and online. Joe teaches in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and in the North Carolina prison system. He is the Managing Editor of the William Blake Archive.

Brooklyn Arts Press, 2018

5.25” x 8”

120 pages