Unwilling: Poems of Horror and Darkness by Gerri Leen
Gerri Leen (May 2024)
Reviewed by Joshua Gage
Gerri Leen spent her childhood and early adult years in the Seattle area but moved to Northern Virginia in the late eighties and has stayed there ever since. She began writing in her forties and credits fanfic over the public school system for teaching her how to punctuate and plot. She prefers writing speculative prose and poetry. She also writes romance under the pen name Kim Strattford. She is a full member of SFWA and HWA. Gerri follows horse racing avidly, is big into single-origin tea, and collects art, focusing on encaustic (especially mixed media) and raku pottery. Her newest collection of poetry is Unwilling: Poems of Horror and Darkness.
Gerri Leen is primarily a fiction writer, and this is readily apparent in her poetry. Most of her poems are narrative and seek to encapsulate a short story in a tight, compact poetic form. The tales themselves are sparse and underdeveloped, but Leen does her best to capture the plot and necessary details to aid her readers into understanding. Take, for example, “Pick a Card,” which opens with the lines
You have drawn the high priestess
In my deck, you can’t tell which
Way she’s looking
Her white gown—dingy if you study it
Sufficiently—flows around her in such
A way as to obscure which is front, which back
The arms of the gown long and uneven
The train extending both forward and back
How does she walk?
The poem continues in this way for a page and a half to a clever ending. However, readers will still be hard pressed to understand what the card in question looks like, and thus are left grasping for the requisite imagery that poetry requires to ground itself in the imagination of the reader.
While the bulk of Leen’s poems are narrative, occasionally she shifts to persona poems, which are similar in craft to her narrative poems. The voices are clear and distinct, and readers can absolutely tell who is speaking and their desires. Take, for example, “Medusa Ups Her Game” which begins
Snakes for hair is so last year
Give me webbing, not spider-made
But of computer linkages
Turn you to stone?
Very old school—let me work
More subtly this time
As I weave my way into your
Social network, as I curate
Your feeds to bring you the
Things you fear most…
Obviously, updating mythic characters into modern situations is nothing new, but Leen’s take on Medusa and other personae throughout this book adds to this genre of poetry, and they read as fresh ideas.
Greei Leen is clearly an experienced author who has been published in anthologies and journals for over a decade, so it is high time she has a collection of poetry published. For readers interested in dark fantasy and horror plots rendered as poetry, this is a solid collection. For readers interested in unique takes on persona poems, this is a solid collection. For readers interesting in one of the newer voices in speculative poetry and the direction speculative poetry is taking, this is a solid collection. If you’re not in one of those three categories, perhaps you should rethink those decisions and check out this book, as it is a well-rounded example of the types of speculative poetry that is gaining attention, and you would be remiss to not read it.
