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Direct link: October poetry (MP3)

In this episode of the Strange Horizons podcast, editor Anaea Lay presents poetry from the October issues of Strange Horizons.

  • “Tatakai“ by Shweta Narayan read by Shweta Narayan. You can read the full text of the poem, and more about Shweta here.
  • “How a Mermaid spends her winters“ by Marchell Dyon read by Julia Rios. You can read the full text of the poem, and more about Marchell here.
  • “Slouching Towards the Garden“ by Margarita Tenser read by Ciro Faienza. You can read the full text of the poem, and more about Margarita here.
  • “Ivy“ by April Grant read by April Grant. You can read the full text of the poem, and more about April here.
  • “Memento Mori“ by Richard Prins read by Richard Prins. You can read the full text of the poem, and more about Richard here.



April Grant lives in Boston. Her backstory includes time as a sidewalk musician, real estate agent, public historian, dishwasher, and librarian. Among her hobbies are biking and ruin appreciation.
Ciro Faienza (pronounced CHEE-roh) is an American/Italian national. He has acted on stages and screens throughout Texas and Massachusetts, and his work as a filmmaker has shown at the Dallas Museum of Art, the Dallas Hub Theater, and the National Gallery, London. His fiction is featured in numerous publications, including Daily Science Fiction and Futuristica, Vol 1. His short story "J'ae's Solution" was a top finalist in PRI's 3-Minute Futures Contest. You can see his visual artwork at his web gallery, Postmedium.
Julia Rios is a queer, Latinx writer, editor, podcaster, and narrator whose writing has appeared in Latin American Literature Today, Lightspeed, and Goblin Fruit, among other places. Formerly a fiction editor for Strange Horizons, their editing work has won multiple awards, including the Hugo Award. Julia is a co-host of This is Why We're Like This, a podcast about how the movies we watch in childhood shape our lives, for better or for worse. They've narrated stories for Escape Pod, Podcastle, Pseudopod, and Cast of Wonders. Find them on Twitter as @omgjulia.
Marchell Dyon is from Chicago, Illinois. Her work has appeared in many publications in print and online. Her most recent work has appeared in Full of Crow, Rainbow Rose Ezine, Blue Lake Review (June 2013), A Little Poetry, and Medusa's Kitchen.
Margarita Tenser is a Ukrainian-born Aussie with a large comic book collection, an intense relationship with punctuation, and a pixie haircut, provided the pixie was dragged through a hedge backwards. She has previously had poetry published in Voiceworks and the UTS Anthology.
Richard Prins received his MFA degree in poetry from New York University. Now he divides his time between managing a building in Brooklyn and consulting for an entertainment company in Dar es Salaam. His work appears in Los Angeles Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Rattle, Redivider, and THRUSH Poetry Journal.
Shweta Narayan was born in India and has lived in Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, the Netherlands, Scotland, and California. They feel kinship with shapeshifters and other liminal beings. Their short fiction and poetry has appeared in Strange Horizons, Mithila Review, Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana, We See a Different Frontier: A Postcolonial Speculative Fiction Anthology, An Alphabet of Embers: An Anthology of Unclassifiables, Lightspeed: Queers Destroy Fantasy, and Clockwork Phoenix 3, among others. Shweta was the Octavia Butler Memorial Scholarship recipient at Clarion 2007 and was shortlisted for the 2010 Nebula Awards.
Current Issue
27 Mar 2023

close calls when / I’m with Thee / dressed to the nines
they took to their heels but the bird was faster.
In this episode of Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast, Reviews Editors Aisha Subramanian and Dan Hartland talk to novelist, reviewer, and Strange Horizons’ Co-ordinating Editor, Gautam Bhatia, about how reviewing and criticism of all kinds align—and do not—with fiction-writing and the genre more widely.
If the future is here, but unevenly distributed, then so is the past.
He claims that Redlow used to be a swamp and he has now brought them into the future before the future. Yes he said that.
My previous Short Fiction Treasures column was all about science fiction, so it’s only fair that the theme this time around is fantasy.
I’ve come to think of trans-inclusive worldbuilding as an activist project in itself, or at least analogous to the work of activists. When we imagine other worlds, we have to observe what rules we are creating to govern the characters, institutions, and internal logic in our stories. This means looking at gender from the top down, as a regulatory system, and from the bottom up, at the people on the margins whose bodies and lives stand in some kind of inherent opposition to the system itself.
Wednesday: And Lately, The Sun edited by Calyx Create Group 
Friday: August Kitko and the Mechas from Space by Alex White 
Issue 20 Mar 2023
Issue 13 Mar 2023
Issue 6 Mar 2023
Issue 20 Feb 2023
Issue 13 Feb 2023
Issue 6 Feb 2023
Issue 30 Jan 2023
By: Catherine Rockwood
By: Romie Stott
Podcast read by: Ciro Faienza
Podcast read by: Catherine Rockwood
Podcast read by: Romie Stott
Podcast read by: Maureen Kincaid Speller
Issue 23 Jan 2023
Issue 16 Jan 2023
Issue 9 Jan 2023
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