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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 of Strange Horizons.

  • "A Modern Prometheus" by Lynette Mejía, read by Julia Rios. You can read the full text of the poem, and more about Lynette, here.
  • "my father as a sonnet on the human meaning of inhuman stars" by Andrew Brenza, read by Anaea Lay. You can read the full text of the poem, and more about Andrew, here.
  • "All That Her Mother Left Her" by John W. Sexton read by Julia Rios. You can read the full text of the poem, and more about John, here.
  • "Abduction" by Laura Madeline Wiseman, read by Laura Madeline Wiseman. You can read the full text of the poem, and more about Laura, here.
  • "St. Patrick and the Snakes" by Jane Yolen, read by Ciro Faienza. You can read the full text of the poem, and more about Jane, here.

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Anaea Lay lives in Chicago, Illinois where she writes, cooks, plays board games, reads too much, and questions the benevolence of the universe. Her work has appeared in many places including Apex, Penumbra, Lightspeed, Daily Science Fiction, and Nightmare. She lives online at anaealay.com.
Andrew Brenza lives and writes in the Philadelphia area with his wife and young son. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Shampoo, Glitterpony, Jellyfish, and/or, Sawbuck, and The Scrambler, among others.  He is obsessed with cold seeps, hot vents, and tidal pools.
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.
Jane Yolen writes poetry for both children and adults. She is a past winner of the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Rhysling award for a short poem, Dwarf Star Award for poems under ten lines, as well as being named by the Association as a Grand Master of science fiction and fantasy poetry. She is a frequent poetry contributor to such genre magazines as Asimov’s, Mythic Delirium, and Goblin Fruit. She has over 370 books published, a huge number of them poetry. Her books have won the Caldecott, the Christopher Medal, the Jewish Book Award, and two of her stories were Nebula winners. Three of her books won the Mythopoeic Award. Last year, she was named a winner of the New England Public Radio’s Arts and Humanities Award. And her Skylark Award set her good coat on fire.
John W. Sexton lives in Ireland and is the author of five previous poetry collections, the most recent being The Offspring of the Moon (Salmon, 2013). His sixth collection, Futures Pass, is due from Salmon in 2015. In 2007 he was awarded a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship in Poetry.
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.
Laura Madeline Wiseman's debut book of poetry is Sprung (San Francisco Bay Press). She is also the author of six chapbooks, including 2012's Unclose the Door. She is the editor of Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence (Hyacinth Girl Press). She has a doctorate from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she teaches creative writing. Stranger Still, a new anthology of her alien-themed poems, will be available in October 2013, and can be pre-ordered through Finishing Line Press.
Lynette Mejía writes science fiction, fantasy, and horror prose and poetry from the middle of a deep, dark forest in the wilds of southern Louisiana. Her work has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Nature: Futures, and others, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, the Rhysling Award, and the Million Writers Award. You can find her online at www.lynettemejia.com.
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
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