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Direct link: January poetry (MP3)

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

  • “Scythia" by Marinelle G. Ringer, read by Marinelle G. Ringer. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Marinelle here.
  • “Orthography in the Lands of Yahm" by Daniel Ausema, read by Daniel Ausema. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Daniel here.
  • “Retirement" by Samantha Renda-Dollman, read by Julia Rios. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Samantha here.
  • “Meatspace" by David C. Kopaska-Merkel, read by Ciro Faienza. You can read the full text of the poem and more about David here.



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.
Daniel Ausema is a writer and poet from Colorado. His poetry has previously appeared in Strange Horizons, and his fiction has appeared in many publications. He is also the creator of the steampunk-fantasy serial fiction project Spire City. He has a background in experiential education and is a stay-at-home dad.
David C. Kopaska-Merkel won the 2006 Rhysling Award for a collaboration with Kendall Evans, edits Dreams & Nightmares magazine, and has edited Star*Line and several Rhysling anthologies. His poems have appeared in Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. A collection, Some Disassembly Required, winner of the 2023 Elgin Award, is available from him at jopnquog@gmail.com.
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.
M. G. Ringer has published poems in The Ontario Review, Cimarron Review, Mudfish, The Hudson Review, and Visions International: The World Journal of Illustrated Poetry, among others.  Ringer's fiction has appeared in First Intensity, Phoenix, and The Midland Review.  Non-fiction publications have concerned everything from American English (International Journal of the Humanities) to Ezra Pound's Cantos (Paideuma).  Ringer has been invited to perform poetry at a number of venues—including the Cornelia Street Cafe in Greenwich Village, New York City, and AS220 in Providence, Rhode Island—as well as deliver scholarly findings at several symposia of the Jack London Society, the American and Popular Culture Associations, the Second International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities, and the Oxford Round Table.
Samantha Renda-Dollman lives in South Africa with her husband, two rabbits and two cats. When not writing poetry or shopping for euro boardgames, she's usually doing something entomological. Or watching crusty old sci-fi movies.
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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