If you've never read Bruce Boston's poetry, I'd normally say "shame on you," but instead I'll just look the other way and ask you to quietly purchase a copy of this book and read it quickly, before anyone else finds out. Because you need to read Bruce Boston, especially if you have any desire to be a SF poet. Boston has been defining the genre of speculative poetry for twenty years or more -- and finally we have Quanta, a book that enumerates the core elements of that definition.

Boston's Quanta is a collection of his award-winning poetry. Again, with emphasis: this entire collection is composed of award-winning poems. I cannot think of another writer in the genre who could fill a book of short pieces with award-winners, with the exception, perhaps, of Harlan Ellison. Indeed, Boston is something of a Harlan Ellison of poetry -- a living legend, an outspoken proponent of literary quality, and an embodiment of a '60s aesthetic that combines wonder with a longing for future possibility.

Reading through Boston's Quanta was for me something akin to poring over a photo album: I was nostalgically reliving my first experience with many of the poems (and relishing the poems I'd always wanted to read, but didn't have access to), remembering just how innocent I was before Boston blew my mind when I discovered him in the small press. And here he managed to do it all over again, knocking my well-worn socks off. You can't read Boston's Quanta without realizing that his work stands the test of time.

In an opening comparison to Van Gogh's rendering of "Starry Night," Andrew Joron's glowing introduction to the book praises Boston's "expressionistic" writing style, in which "words no longer function merely as record-keeping devices, but become a kind of darkly luminescent substance applied to the white surface of the page." Boston accomplishes this through his emphasis not so much on what words mean, but how they sound and, consequently, ring the chimes we hang in our unconscious.

Indeed, this very modus operandi may be at work in the somewhat self-reflexive poem, "The Nightmare Collector" -- winner of the Science Fiction Poetry Association's Rhysling Award in 1987. This poem generates a creepy effect by using second person. The reader is put in the position of an innocent sleeper, visited by a dark stranger wearing a mysterious dark coat: "From the endless slashes / in his voluminous greatcoat / you can feel the heat / of captured bodies / invade your rumpled bed / with delirium and fever; / you can smell a brassy sediment of tears. You can hear the pulse / and thump of unborn shadows, / a dense hysteric fugue." These sounds conjure the very nightmare that the visitor hopes to gather into his dark "greatcoat."

This is just one brilliant example of Boston's dark vision in the collection, and there are plenty of others -- ranging from the dark fantasy of "Return to the Mutant Rain Forest" (another Rhysling winner, this time co-written with Robert Frazier) to the charmingly dark humor poem, "Old Robots are the Worst" (which won the Asimov's Reader's Award).

One of my favorites in Quanta is "Confessions of the Body Thief," which successfully compresses a novel-sized premise into a long poem of 143 lines. "Body Thief" is about a soul who hops from body to body, living another person's life over and over, but "like a raindrop on a window / that reflects the room beyond / can never find a passage / through the surface of the pane." The poem manages to capture a speculative concept, rend the magical into a tragic and all-too-human viewpoint, and even sneak in a little metafictional poke at what it is that readers, too, do.

Quanta's range is remarkable. Because it spans so much time, it can take snapshots of recurring motifs in Boston's prodigiously varied work. For example, Quanta contains two poems each from his series of "Spacer" astronaut poems and his series of "Accursed Wives" poems. The latter series was so popular with readers that Boston himself admits in the introduction to "Curse of the Shapeshifter's Wife" that he had "painted himself into a corner" by writing so many of them. (To wit: 35 poems and 5 short stories, all collected in his book, The Complete Accursed Wives (recently released as an e-book on fictionwise.com)). Here we get not only the Shapeshifter's Wife but also "The Curse of the SF Writer's Wife," who goes to extreme measures in her desire to stop her husband from -- literally -- taking risky flights with his imagination every time she turns her back.

Altogether, the book collects 12 poems, each introduced individually by the author, who either explains the history of the poem, or his intention within it. Rounding out the 60+ page book is a bibliography of all Boston's writing and a short autobiographical essay, "The Making of a Speculative Poet." In the latter, the author insightfully discusses the differences between "science fiction poetry" and "speculative poetry," then attempts to explain what his poetry is about. Here, surprisingly, words fail him, so he ends simply, urging the reader to read the poems themselves. And he's right: there are plenty of lessons within Quanta. I urge you to learn them.

A collectible, necessary volume. Buy it before it's sold out.

Michael A. Arnzen teaches the writing and study of popular fiction at Seton Hill University. His horror reviews have appeared recently in The New York Review of Science Fiction, Science Fiction Studies, and Paradoxa. Arnzen's novel, Grave Markings, was the recipient of both the Bram Stoker Award and the International Horror Critics Guild Award in 1995. He invites readers to visit his home page and e-poetry experiment.