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Direct link: The Suitcase Aria (mp3)

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

  • "Ekphrastic 22/The Drowning Girl" by Jenn Grunigen, read by Jenn Grunigen. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Jenn here.
  • "The Paper Boy" by Mike Allen, read by Mike Allen. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Mike here.
  • "Food Diary of Gark the Troll" by Jessy Randall, read by Tina Connolly. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Jessy here.
  • "Una Canción de Keys" by Lisa M. Bradley, read by Lisa M. Bradley, and Ciro Faienza. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Lisa here.
  • "Rehearsal for When He Wakes" by Anne Carly Abad, read by Julia Rios. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Anne here.
  • "The Rotten Leaf Cantata" by Rose Lemberg, read by Rose Lemberg. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Rose here.
  • "Rebel" by Danielle Higgins, read by Clare McBride. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Danielle here.

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Anne Carly Abad received the Poet of the Year Award in the 2017 Nick Joaquin Literary Awards. She has also received nominations for the Pushcart Prize and the Rhysling Award. Her work has appeared in Apex, Mythic Delirium, and Strange Horizons, to name a few. Her first poetry collection, We've Been Here Before, is forthcoming this February 2022 with Aqueduct Press. You can preorder the book by emailing the publisher at info@aqueductpress.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.
Clare McBride is a podcast reader for Strange Horizons.
Danielle Higgins is a screenwriter who enjoys experimenting with poetry, flash fiction, and novels. She is completing her diploma in Professional Writing and Editing, and is currently working on a television series. She enjoys writing character-driven mysteries with elements of the supernatural and horror.
Jenn Grunigen is a writer, folklorist, and metal drummer. She is a graduate of the 2016 Clarion Writers’ workshop; her writing has appeared in Shimmer, Spolia and elsewhere. Her SF novel, Skyglass, a wild tale of sex, elves and rock ‘n’ roll, is available now from Chromatic Press.
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 M. Bradley is a Tejana living in Iowa. Her words have infiltrated Uncanny Magazine, Interfictions, Cicada, The Moment of Change, Mythic Delirium, and other publications. She loves gothic country music, broken taboos, Spanglish, and horror films—all of which influenced her collection, The Haunted Girl (Aqueduct Press). For more, see her website or Twitter.
Mike Allen is president of the Science Fiction Poetry Association and editor of the speculative poetry journal Mythic Delirium. With Roger Dutcher, Mike is also editor of The Alchemy of Stars: Rhysling Award Winners Showcase, which for the first time collects the Rhysling Award-winning poems from 1978 to 2004 in one volume. His newest poetry collection, Disturbing Muses, is out from Prime Books, with a second collection, Strange Wisdoms of the Dead, soon to follow. Mike's poems can also be found in Nebula Awards Showcase 2005, both editions of The 2005 Rhysling Anthology, and the Strange Horizons archives.
R.B. Lemberg (they/them) is a queer, bigender immigrant from Ukraine to the US. R.B. is an author of six books of speculative fiction and poetry, an academic, and a translator from Ukrainian and Russian. R.B.’s work has been shortlisted for the Le Guin Prize for Fiction, Nebula, Locus, Ignyte, World Fantasy, and other awards. You can find R.B. on Instagram at @rblemberg, Bluesky at @rblemberg.bsky.social, and at their website rblemberg.net.
Tina Connolly (tinaconnolly@gmail.com) is a writer and face painter in Portland, Oregon. Her stories and poems have appeared here in Strange Horizons, as well as in Podcastle, GUD, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. This story was inspired by an exercise at Ellen Klages' 2009 workshop at Hugo House in Seattle. Tina has a website at http://tinaconnolly.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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