Ignited Melodies by Emberly Lily Summers
Independently Published (March 2021)
128 pages; $7.24 paperback, $2.99 e-book
Reviewed by Joshua Gage
Emberly Lily Summers (Lauren Adele) is native to Baltimore, Maryland, and has been writing for the last ten years. She is a blind author and writes poetry, paranormal romance, and urban fantasy. Her debut novel HUNTED: The Immortal’s Kiss cowritten with Luna Nyx Frost is available on Amazon. She has had several poems featured in Maryland’s Best Emerging Poets 2019 by Z Publishing and Fae Thee Well: An Anthology and Rogues and Rebels: An Anthology both published by Dreampunk Press. Her inspiration comes from nature, the fantasy and paranormal literature, classic musicals such as The Phantom of the Opera and Wicked and of course, her favorite music ranging from showtunes to punk rock. Emberly also loves reading about magic, mythology, faeries, witches, and dragons. Her newest collection is Ignited Melodies.
Ignited Melodies reads very much like a first collection of poetry, in that there’s no overarching theme or narrative, but a collection of individual poems gathered. As such, it’s not a pure horror collection, but there is plenty of horror poetry to be found between these covers. For example, “The Silent Predator,” which begins with the lines
Blanketed by ink black darkness of night,
Specks of moonlight illuminate the ominous abyss.
The witching hour looming in the distance
Slithering through the slumbering city streets.
The language here is decadent, full of consonance, and serves to overwhelm the reader with its lushness. Elsewhere, Summers writes horror persona poems, with much the same success. Her poem “Monstrous Delights” begins
I am a monster,
A vicious fiend.
Feasting on the fear
Of brainless walking meat suits
Desperately clinging to fleeting
Some remnants of humanity.
Here, again, we see Summers’ distinctive rich, linguistic style, heavy with words, come forth.
Overall, Ignited Melodies may not appeal to every horror reader, as many of the poems in the collection are not strictly horror. But for those willing to explore the haunted forests of Emberly Lily Summers’ mind, there is plenty of horror to be found. Writing with language that is thick and dense, Summers pulls back the skin to her own private fantasies and nightmares, and invites us in for a taste. The ticket is free, so I encourage you to peruse at your leisure, finding those gems that shine for you.
