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Direct link: November poetry (MP3)

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

  • "Counterpart" by Stefanie Maclin, read by Julia Rios. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Stefanie here.
  • "What the Higgs Boson Means to Me" by C. W. Johnson, read by Anaea Lay. You can read the full text of the poem and more about C. W. here.
  • "Sand Bags" by Dominik Parisien, read by Anaea Lay. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Dominik here.
  • "Datafall" by Richard Larson, read by Julia Rios. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Richard here.



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.
C. W. Johnson's poems have appeared in Asimov's, Stone Telling, Goblin Fruit, Star*Line, and non-genre magazines. His 2012 poem "Vigor Mortis" was nominated for a Rhysling Award. Johnson's fiction has been published in Analog, Asimov's, Interzone, The Other Half of the Sky, and elsewhere. He is a professor of physics specializing in theoretical nuclear physics, and his research articles appear in Physical Review C and elsewhere.
Dominik Parisien is a Franco-Ontarian living in Montreal, Quebec. His poetry has appeared in print and online, in the 2013 Strange Horizons fundraising bonus issue for example, and has been reprinted in Imaginarium 2013: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing. He is the poetry editor for Postscripts to Darkness, provides editorial support for Cheeky Frawg Books, and is a former editorial assistant for Weird Tales.
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.
Richard Larson's short stories have appeared in ChiZine, Electric Velocipede, Pindeldyboz, Vibrant Gray, and others. He also reviews books and movies, and he blogs at http://rlarson.typepad.com. He is currently a graduate student at New York University.
Stefanie Maclin's poetry and short fiction have appeared in such publications as Battered Suitcase, Illumen, Star*Line, Astropoetica, and Dreams & Nightmares. A full list of her publications can be found at http://thesilentpoet.livejournal.com/253812.html. She currently lives in the Boston area, where she spends her days as a librarian.
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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