Unwelcome Guests by David Kopaska-Merkel
Weird House Books (June 2024)
Reviewed by Joshua Gage
David C. Kopaska-Merkel is the editor and publisher of Dreams and Nightmares magazine, and was for six years the editor of Star*Line, the journal of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. Thirty-two books and thousands of poems and stories have been published in over a thousand venues since the early 1980s. The latest poetry collection is Unwelcome Guests.
Everything about the book, from the cover to the poems themselves, implies a comedic horror element. This comedy is not limited in scope, though. Kopaska-Merkl is equally adept at writing humorous science fiction horror senryu:
we don’t celebrate
landing day up here
the crater’s too fresh
or body horror senryu
head in one hand
plastic sack in another
doorbell rings
or even longer poems of science fiction political horror, like “We’re Begging You,” which includes the lines
So, Galactic Union,
or whoever’s out there,
come help us soon
unless you’re psycho
cannibal slavers
and we can negotiate
on the cannibal part,
we’re fed up with psycho
Clearly, Kopaska-Merkel is using poetry as a vehicle for humor, not taking his subjects too seriously, and encouraging his readers to do the same.
Overall, the book is effective as a clever collection of humorous speculative poetry. There is everything from puns and slapstick to wit and satire. Nothing in this collection is too dark or scary, and none of the subjects are given the seriousness which one might expect from a horror collection. Within that, this is a very successful poetry collection, and part of the joy and surprise of the book, part of the humor, is that readers are expecting just that — dark and Weird poems — and receiving that, but with a clever humorous that many readers will find very entertaining.
