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Direct link: November poetry (MP3)

In this episode of the Strange Horizons podcast, guest editor Ciro Faienza presents poetry from the issues.

  • “Incendiaries" by Jane Crowley, read by Romie Stott. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Jane here.
  • “Brass" by Erik Amundsen, read by Ciro Faienza. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Erik here.
  • “The rivers, the birchgroves, all the receding earth" by Rose Lemberg, read by Ciro Faienza. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Rose here.
  • “The Mermaid of Lincoln Park Lagoon" by Valya Dudycz Lupescu, read by Valya Dudycz Lupescu. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Valya Dudycz here.
  • “You Are Here" by Bogi Takács, read by Julia Rios. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Bogi here.



Bogi Takács (they/them or e/em) started working on the poetry / flash fiction series “Jobs for Magical People (That Do Not Involve the Military)” in response to the Israeli invasion of Gaza. E would like to ask you to consider how authoritarian power manifests the world over (including in the stories we tell), then do something to counteract it. Bogi is a writer, poet, critic and scholar of speculative literature; and also a Hungarian Jewish immigrant to the US, a winner of the Hugo and Lambda awards, and a finalist for other awards like the Ignyte and the Locus. Eir second short story collection Power to Yield and Other Stories was published earlier in 2024 by Broken Eye Books, and eir poetry collection Algorithmic Shapeshifting is available from Aqueduct.
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.
Erik Amundsen, dressed in indigo, flew to the moon on a pink flamindigo. His work has been found in Clarkesworld, Weird Tales, and Jabberwocky.
Jane Crowley is deeply enthusiastic about tea, being in and around water, and things with wings (mechanical or avian). By day she is a marketer for a UK university. By night she writes poetry and other miscellaneous fragments that occasionally find a home and get published. You can find her on Twitter at @j_e_crowley.
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.
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.
Romie Stott is the administrative editor and a poetry editor of Strange Horizons. Her poems have appeared in inkscrawl, Dreams & Nightmares, Polu Texni, On Spec, The Deadlands, and Liminality, but she is better known for her essays in The Toast and Atlas Obscura, and a microfiction project called postorbital. As a filmmaker, she has been a guest artist of the National Gallery (London), the Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston), and the Dallas Museum of Art. You can find her fairly complete bibliography here.
Valya Dudycz Lupescu is the author of The Silence of Trees and founding editor of Conclave: A Journal of Character. Her poetry and prose have been published in Gone Lawn, Jersey Devil Press, Mythic Delirium, Danse Macabre, Fickle Muses, Abyss & Apex, Pedestal Magazine, Doorknobs & Bodypaint, and other places. Since earning her MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Valya has worked as a college professor, obituary writer, content manager, goth cocktail waitress, and co-producer of an independent feature film. Her first comic book, Sticks & Bones, created with artist Madeline C. Matz, was successfully crowdfunded via kickstarter. They are now working on the next three issues to be published by First Comics. Her website is www.vdlupescu.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
Friday: Adam and Eve in Paradise by José Maria de Eça de Queirós, translated by Margaret Jull Costa 
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