Continuing his quest to wash dishes on every inhabited colony in the solar system, Javelin Praecox heads for Venus. There, a small scientific expedition to study weather and extremophile bacteria has encountered the unexpected—a new alien species! The mushroom-shaped Venusians come in a variety of colors and sexes, speak a strange pidgin English, love blueberry pancakes and pickled eggs, and make a magic elixir called lime wine. These new creatures also present several mysteries. Where did...

This collection of 70+ limerick verses based on H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos combines horror and humor in equal measure to demonstrate that man's view of himself as the center of a known space-time continuum remains laughably out of scale with the reality that ancient forces control his world.

The Clangers want to smuggle screech into Mars. The cops want to stop them. The huggies want to save the Martian environment. The native Paubaubau want to protect their sacred waffle paddies. The waffle gods want to preserve the interdimensional gateway. Javelin Praecox just wants to wash dishes. But first he has to escape the Clangers, avoid the police, deal with the huggies, survive life with the native Martians, and navigate the layers of Waffle Consciousness. But what good is it to be ...

Hester Featherstone thought she had life on the Ol’ Smoke’s filthy, dangerous streets all figured out. As a freelance toothpicker, she salvages children’s teeth for the viceroy, while keeping her identity as a mutant of the insect-wing class a secret. Hester’s luck takes a turn for the worse the day she kills fellow toothpicker Phelan MacHoof in self-defense. Spotted flying from the scene, she soon finds herself caught in the viceroy’s plot to eliminate his wife’s lovers, while pursued by ...

Javelin Praecox has one goal--to wash dishes on every inhabited planet in the solar system. His first stop, a mining base on Uranus, promises to be pretty easy, with the native stickies (something like an ant made out of marshmallows) to do all the work. But then more crew members disappear, and a mysterious creature smears feces throughout the base. While tracking the stickies to learn what they do with the leftover food they collect, Javy is caught in one of the weirdest prison camps eve...

Looking for a short, fast form for poetry with minimal restrictions but maximum bite? Friends, meet the no-ku: four lines (standard), short on syllables (from two to eight), rhymed (by different schemes), topical (or not), satirical (preferred). It's condensed like haiku, but prefers intense outbursts and constant re-invention, like no wave punk. No Ku. I started writing these short poems during the "economic collapse," when corporations and business leaders that had previously slammed "we...

In a nightmare world that inverts the Xmas spirit and traditions, the first law is eat or be eaten, consume or be consumed. Sesam always refused to believe the Xmas legends. After the Claus and his elf swarm kill or capture everyone he knows, Sesam vows to kill Claus. If the poison from an elf's candy cane doesn't kill him, he might be eaten by the cannibal snowmen, zombie xmas trees, octopus-flies, or jelly creatures. Along the way, Sesam learns terrible secrets about his fellow humans, h...

Summoning iconic outlaws and rebels such as Johnny Appleseed, Casanova, and Bonnie and Clyde, the poems in this collection seek to alter and turn back the mass mediated tendency to find "the great awakening in a/car; nirvana in a hamburger,/a genie in a tube/of toothpaste." The poems direct this discontent with the real world, not into another call for action or mere complaint, but into a performance that enacts the very change it seeks. This is the point where poems become rituals of coun...

Home of the first settlement in the United States and known as Old Dominion and The Mother of Presidents, the state of Virginia’s artistic output proves among the most fecund in the nation, evidenced in this ninth volume of The Southern Poetry Anthology. This collection includes well-known, established, and celebrated poets such as Charles Wright, Claudia Emerson, Gregory Orr, Ellen Bryant Voigt, R. T. Smith, Forrest Gander, and Rita Dove, and the editors have dedicated equal focu...