Tiny Oblivions and Mutual Self-Destructions by Maxwell I. Gold
Raw Dog Screaming Press (August 22, 2024)
Reviewed by Joshua Gage
Maxwell I. Gold is a Jewish-American cosmic horror poet and editor, with an extensive body of work comprising over 300 poems since 2017. His writings have earned a place alongside many literary luminaries in the speculative fiction genre. His work has appeared in numerous literary journals, magazines, and anthologies such as Spectral Realms, Weird Tales Magazine, Startling Stories, Space and Time Magazine, Other Terrors: An Inclusive Anthology, Chiral Mad 5, and many more. Maxwell’s work has been recognized with multiple nominations including the Eric Hoffer Award, Pushcart Prize, and Bram Stoker Awards. His newest collection of prose poetry is Tiny Oblivions and Mutual Self-Destructions.
As the title implies, Tiny Oblivions and Mutual Self-Destructions is a book of cosmic horror. Titles like “The Ruinations of Ad’Naigon” and “We’re Here to Eat You, and Devour the Lights” are clearly traditional cosmic horror in a prose poetry format. Gold is known as a prose poet, and most of his poetry is within that form. Gold is certainly attempting to tap into the Weird tradition, as well, with poems like “Proxima Primordia.” He’s in good company here, as Weird and Cosmic horror poetry has always had prose poems, going back to H. P. Lovecraft, if not earlier, and the poems in the collection echo those images and themes.
Prose poetry is an interesting idea because, without line breaks to determine the rhythm and pacing of a poem, readers are left with a block of prose, and are asked to perceive it as a poem, paying attention to the specific techniques and tools used by poets. This not only differentiates prose poems from flash and micro fiction, but also allows the reader to understand that plot and character are less important than language and emotion. Too often in this collection, though, the language is vague and narrative, lacking the concrete imagery or language play that the word “poetry” would imply. For example, the opening poem “Proem for Oblivion,” reads
The body bleeds, the mind rots, and in the end there’s nothing left but
madness whose slime unravels the decadence we proclaim to be reality.
Piece by piece, the game is played until we tear each other apart in
beautiful syncopation as if the gods strung us together for purposes
dictated before primal utterances were ever possible.
It was useless to fight, but only to succumb to the pressures of
inevitability, heat, and weight until it started all over again, and again as
my body bleeds, my mind rots, and in the end there’s nothing left but tiny,
tiny oblivions.
This is a narrative with a plot, but it lacks the elements that one would expect from a poem — concrete imagery, metaphor or simile, etc. It reads like a cosmic horror microfiction, not a poem. This does not make it, nor any of the other poems in this collection, bad writing, simply ineffective poems, and if readers reframe their expectations to reading this as a flash fiction or short story collection, the book will probably make more sense.
That being said, Gold tempts readers late in the book with the idea that he might be exploring other forms. Tucked on page 81 is a litany titled “The Mouth That Cries Oblivion” that breaks away from the prose poem form. This poem echoes Allen Ginsberg and Walt Whitman’s long, vatic lines, only Gold puts his trademark Weird cosmic horror spin on it, with very interesting results.
At the end, out of the mouth inside mirrors or worse, trunks twisted and turned inside-out
from blasted woods and burnt philosophies raised Bridges of Nowhere until none
crossed the threshold, again
At the end, out of the mouth-full-of-stars only hideous regrets as dark as syrup and bile
dripped from the teeth and tightly pulled skin-walls too high to climb, too wide to scale, but terrible in name,
At the end, out of the mouth, cities crumbled by sacred word, unholy sword and light
misconstrued through doctrine curled like fork tongue by Crimson Faced devils
This poem is rich in language and surreal, damned imagery. Gold is tapping into new sources of poetic forms and poetic craft here, and this hidden gem of the book really stands out as the pinnacle of the collection.
Tiny Oblivions and Mutual Self-Destructions is a book of cosmic horror and Weird prose poems; however, most of the pieces in this book lack the requisite craft to be considered poems or poetry, and the collection reads more like a series of flash fiction and micro stories. The writing is vague and ethereal, as one would expect from such topics, with the lone exception of “The Mouth That Cries Oblivion,” which is clearly the strongest poem of the collection by far. Poems like that prove that Gold has the skill to craft tight horror poems when he chooses to break away from his trademark prose poems and should be encouraged. For fans of Gold’s other books and for fans of Weird and Cosmic horror, this collection will not disappoint.
