Dark Matters

Bruce Boston's BRAM STOKER AWARD-WINNING 30th book of poetry collects 49 poems, six of them appearing here for the first time. Includes reprints from Asimov's SF Magazine, Chizine, The Pedestal Magazine, The Rhysling Anthology, Space and Time, Strange Horizons, and other leading genre and literary publications. Beautifully illustrated by Daniele Serra. 


Whether he’s writing about an errant siren, a grimoire, a vulture, or the apocalyptic implosion of our way of life, Boston does it with stunning and unexpected complexity. There is a sense of completeness to his poems, a sense that he has turned the thing around and looked at it from every angle. He offers insights that are startling in their clarity, and—after he’s shown them to us—completely logical.This is a laudable achievement in and of itself, but the fact that he can balance his eye for detail and his intuition about character with a poet’s ear for the lyrical joy of language is awe-inspiring. 


— Joe McKinney, 

author of Dead City and Quarantined 


Dark Matters places an extraordinary gallery before us—rat people and robovamps, dystopias and surreal landscapes— rendered in all the rich colors of Bruce Boston’s vivid word palette. Whether he’s speculating on the dead who come to us in our dreams (“Like Scarlet Birds Screeching”) or taking us on a journey to a unique version of hell (“From the Damnation Cemetery”), every piece here brightens and expands what Boston calls “the bereft vocabulary of our lives.” There’s no one in American poetry quite like Bruce Boston, and Dark Matters is one of his best. 


— Christopher Conlon, 

author of Starkweather Dreams 

and Midnight on Mourn Street