My Goodreads review: HWA Poetry Showcase Volume IV
HWA Poetry Showcase Volume IV by David E. Cowen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
[Disclaimer: I have a poem in this collection. Furthermore, it's one of the "special mention" poems the jurors chose to recognize this year. Please consider this review as more of a buyers' guide.]
This year's HWA Poetry Showcase celebrates the poetic side of the Dark Art of horror writing, as practiced by the HWA membership. It functions as both a contest and a showcase -- there are 3 Featured Poems (winners) and 3 Special Mention poems ( runners-up). The Kindle edition is fully indexed, and all the poems appear to have survived the conversion from print -- at least, so far as I could tell by comparing to a PDF copy. This in itself is notable!
The poems themselves are very diverse -- mainly free verse, but with a fair number of formal works as well. Most of the poems here are narrative. Subject matter and tone vary widely, though there was quite a bit of graveyard/ body horror. Almost all the works here would be very accessible to readers of prose horror.
An optimistic "Note from the Editor" -- David E. Cowen -- celebrates and comments upon the survival of dark poetry and other speculative verse, even in a time when mainstream poetry seems to be struggling in America.
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