CAW: Poetry by a Murder of Writers edited by Stasha Strange
Ix Studios (October 2024)
Reviewed by Joshua Gage
Stasha Strange is a writer who draws inspiration from the untamed worlds found within books. Recently, she embarked on a new chapter of her life, transitioning from the vibrant San Francisco Bay Area to the welcoming embrace of Ohio. Beyond her literary pursuits, she passionately advocates for the homeless and tenants’ rights. She shares her life journey with her partner, Andrew, and her beloved companions, a feline familiar, Jax, and a silly California King Snake named Noods.
Strange admits in her introduction that “this book’s genesis emerged from the depths of a dream.” Strange had a vision of a gothic literary anthology that was “a collection of writers whose voices I admired and whose words resonated with me on a profound level.” With all proceeds set to benefit the Ohio Bird Sanctuary, Stasha Strange gathered her cohort of authors and the anthology was born.
Where these poems are defensibly horror and gothic, they do work. There are some known authors throughout this collection, like Kaytee Thrum, who is a recognized dark poet and creator of Chicago’s The Poetica poetry troupe. Her poems, like “The Vulture,” are deeply personal and moving, with its lines tapping into a Gothic sensibility:
Picking at my dying carcass, you were
For nearly a year after you had left me
You made empty promises that you would return
But each night, the bed stayed ice cold
Like my exposed tendons and bones
The idea of a lover as a vulture picking at the dead corpse of a relationship is exactly the sort of thing one can expect from this anthology. Poems like this are dark, moody, and creepy; one might even say poems like this are atmospheric in their ambiguity, where readers are given hints and clues of imagery, but nothing solid and concrete. Poems like this are written to be emotionally haunting, and when they are successful, often haunt the reader well after the book is closed.
However, in her eagerness to compile an anthology, Stasha Strange often invited poets she admired to write horror or Gothic poetry, and they struggled. There are many authors in here who simply aren’t horror authors, and they make attempts at horror or Gothic literature which read as such. For example, Anglo-Irish novelist D. L. White has three poetry collections to his name, but none of them would be considered or marketed as horror. So his poem, “Wild Places,” reads as forced and stuttered
I wish to wallow in wild places.
instead I’m slunk in pathless stasis.
Solitude, it creeps in dangerous;
loneliness seems so contagious.I recall a time
too far ago to mention.
I’d rest my bones
on sea and sand:
sit, watch, and listen,with zealous beats
a child’s heart owns.
The poem proceeds as directionless as it started, clopping from forced-rhymed tetrameter to almost a limerick shaped stanza, but with almost no rhyme. The poem struggles to find itself and reads very much like someone trying to attempt horror or Gothic poetry. For many of the authors in this book, horror is not their primary genre, possibly not even a known or familiar genre for the authors, and the work suffers because of it.
Stasha Strange is a newer writer who had a vision of an anthology of horror and gothic poetry. She has done what she can to complete that vision. Furthermore, she has used that dream to benefit a charity, the Ohio Bird Sanctuary. This is a worthy dream and a worthy goal, and if nothing else, Strange and this anthology should both be celebrated for that; artists creating art solely for the benefit of the community is always worthy of praise. There are plenty of solid poems by known horror and Gothic authors in this collection. The fact that other poets, traditionally not horror-associated, made attempts at horror poetry should tell you how powerful Strange’s vision for this project was and how much people wanted to participate. If their poems aren’t up to par with some of the others in the book, so be it. There is plenty of solid Gothic poetry here for readers to enjoy, and the fact that the book’s profits are entirely going to charity makes this an obvious buy for horror readers of all types .
