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Direct link: August poetry (MP3)

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

  • “Note to the Caretaker" by Lisa Bellamy, read by Ciro Faienza. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Lisa here.
  • “Helmets of the Future" by Jessy Randall, read by Julia Rios. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Jessy here.
  • “A Universe Collided" by Charles Bane, Jr., read by Diane Severson Mori. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Charles here.
  • “A Pantheon of Madnesses" by Cory O'Brien, read by Cory O'Brien. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Cory here.



Charles Bane, Jr. is the American author of The Chapbook (Curbside Splendor, 2011) and Love Poems (Aldrich Press, 2014). The Huffington Post described his work as "not only standing on the shoulders of giants, but shrinking them." The creator of the Meaning Of Poetry Series for The Project Gutenberg Project, he is a current nominee as Poet Laureate of Florida. His website is www.charlesbanejr.com.
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.
Cory O'Brien is a writer, primarily of words, but also computer code and faces. He has an MFA in writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is the author of Zeus Grants Stupid Wishes: A No-Bullshit Guide to World Mythology. He retells mythology and his life story at bettermyths.com.
Jessy Randall’s poems and stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Asimov’s, Nature, and Scientific American. Her most recent book is Mathematics for Ladies: Poems on Women in Science (MIT, 2022). She is a librarian at Colorado College, and her website is http://bit.ly/JessyRandall.
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.
Lisa Bellamy teaches at The Writers Studio. Her chapbook, Nectar, won the Encircle Publications Chapbook Contest. Her work has appeared in Tri-QuarterlyThe Sun, New Ohio Review, Calyx, and PANK, among other publications. She won the Fugue Poetry Prize and received honorable mention in Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 2007.
Current Issue
24 Mar 2025

The winner is the one with the most living wasps
Every insect was a chalk outline of agony / defined, evaluated, ranked / by how much it hurt
In this episode of the Strange Horizons Fiction podcast, Michael Ireland presents Reprise by Samantha Lane Murphy, read by Emmie Christie. Subscribe to the Strange Horizons podcast: Spotify
Black speculative poetry works this way too. It’s text that is flexible and immediate. It’s a safe space to explore Afrocentric text rooted in story, song, dance, rhythm that natural flows from my intrinsic self. It’s text that has a lot of hurt, as in pain, and a lot of healing—an acceptance of self, black is beauty, despite what the slave trade, colonialism, racism, social injustice might tell us.
It’s not that I never read realistic fiction and not that I don’t like it. It’s just that sometimes I don’t get it. I know realistic fiction, speculative fiction, and genre fiction are just terms we made up to sell more narrative, but I’m skeptical of how the expectations and norms of realism lurk, largely uninterrogated or even fully articulated, in the way readers, editors, and publishers interact with work that purports to depict quote unquote real life.  Most broadly defined, realistic stories depict the quotidian and accurately reproduce the daily events, characters, and settings of the world we live
Friday: Adam and Eve in Paradise by José Maria de Eça de Queirós, translated by Margaret Jull Costa 
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