Weird Worlds by Colleen Anderson

The signed trade paperback edition of Weird Worlds is in stock and shipping!

Weird Worlds is a full banquet of horror from a hellaciously skillful poet with a lengthy history of publications and awards. Colleen Anderson brings all her dark and terrible gifts to this comprehensive collection.

SAMPLE POEMS

Savor

Hellhounds are known for their scavenging

hoards that Hades envies

obsidian and the reds of glistening blood

cleaned of flesh, the ivory polished

they proudly wear their victims’ bones

a claxon to the wary

But once every while 

when the moon turns blue

they slink through dire caverns 

leap from the Stygian abyss

whet appetites on bright sparks

as they catch a falling star

Divinity in the Afterglow

There are shadows of angels

All metal struts and bones

How they fly, I don’t know

When made of earthy ores

But then they are only shades

The ghosts of what was before

Perhaps that’s the reason angels came to be

If that’s the case

Then this atomic blast 

Has sent us all to heaven

Supplications fall as ashen powder

Drift over bodies shrouded grey 

Angels do not reply, uncaring or unreal

Pleas distill through sirens, screams

The agony of the world devoid

It is only in this final moment 

As flesh melts and bones burn 

That I see forms aglow

The incandescent dream of angels

Carries me on flaming wings

Praise for Weird Worlds

“Colleen Anderson is one of today’s most powerful poetic voices. She understands the many subtle nuances of darkness. Every single poem in Weird Worlds has real bite!”
— Jonathan Maberry, NY Times bestselling author of NecroTek and editor of Shadows & Verse

“Colleen Anderson takes us on a dark and mystical journey to explore the strangest of all Weird Worlds, the one in our heads we only glance in the liminal airspace between dreams. A compelling collection of unusual perspectives that effortlessly melds symbolism and peculiar beauty. If the Cheshire Cat and Edgar Allen Poe had a baby, that might be this collection.”
— Angela Yuriko Smith, two-time Bram Stoker Award Winner

“In Colleen Anderson’s Weird Worlds, Alice plummets through new voids, through clotted dreams and black holes that are beyond the normal mimsy, in a collection that is pure eviscerated joy. Dark and lush and ultimately transcendent, Anderson’s poems straddle the borders between worlds. Watch for this book of numinous curios on all the award lists.”
— Lee Murray, Bram Stoker Award-winner and co-author of Tortured Willows

“This is a substantial body of work. Bodies martyred, bodies warped, bodies transformed … It is so good to read some poetry that is actually weird, rather than simply weird poetry! The breadth of vision and craft that is showcased in this collection is astonishing but not surprising: Colleen Anderson is one of the most accomplished poets working in the field today.”
— Kyla Lee Ward, Australian Shadows and Aurealis Award-winning author of The Macabre Modern and Those That Pursue Us Yet

“Colleen Anderson’s Weird Worlds is a Speculative Odyssey through horror-scapes of wonder that thrust you into the presence of werewolves, post-apocalyptic robots, Eerie Droughts, and even your perfect lover. It is the Gulliver’s Travels of horror poetry, whose breath and scope transcend the limits of the imagination while remaining anchored to the beating heart of our fears. This is another grand collection from one of the best poets of our time.”
— Jamal Hodge, author of The Dark Between the Twilight, editor of Bestiary of Blood

“Weird Worlds brings out the knives early and goes straight for the tenderest places, the ones you most want to protect. Once you open the cover, pain and death come quickly, if not necessarily in that order. And if gore is not enough, vicarious terror too pedestrian for you, never fear. Weird Worlds can horrify bloodlessly, even gently, and does not hesitate. The willing sacrifice, the loving murderer, the metaphorical trampling of flowers, all have their places here. These worlds are all kinds of weird, but not for the faint of heart, or the weak of stomach.”
— David C. Kopaska-Merkel, author of Some Disassembly Required, winner of the Elgin award

“Weird Worlds indeed—worlds where pop culture and myth collide and ricochet in unexpected directions. Worlds of dry humor, dark eroticism, deep imagination. Spanning decades in Rhysling Award winner Colleen Anderson’s adventuresome career, this collection presents a charcuterie of morbid delights.”
— Mike Allen, World Fantasy Award-nominated author of Slow Burn, and three-time Rhysling Award winner

“Weird Worlds displays Colleen Anderson’s consummate poetic skills. Minimizing punctuation allows sentences to bleed into and out of each other, in syntactic play that echoes the strangeness of her dreamscapes. A phrase like “angst-filled wine … candlelight” demonstrates her virtuosic soundplay—similar vowels in parallel order, consonants in juggling dance. Occasional formal poems are beautiful outcroppings in a free verse earthscape: haiku and hay(na)ku, palindrome poem and concrete poem, ghazal and double tetractys. Aficionados of poetic craft will find a veritable feast in Weird Worlds.”
— Vince Gotera, Poet Laureate of Iowa, Editor of the North American Review and Star*Line

“Dream, dream divine, my dear …” Colleen Anderson’s latest collection is a dream divine, swirling with opulent imagery, lyrical mastery, and cutting observations. In Weird Worlds, the reader plunges into the fantastic, shadowy, experimental stream of Anderson’s imagination and emerges shivering and wide-eyed. It is a realm well worth visiting.”
— Geneve Flynn, multi-award-winning author, editor, and poet; works include Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women and Tortured Willows: Bent, Bowed, Unbroken

About the Author

Colleen Anderson is a Canadian author with a BFA in writing whose works have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Aurora, Rhysling, Elgin and Dwarf Stars Awards in poetry, and longlisted for the Stoker Award in fiction. Her poem “Machine (r)Evolution” won the Rhysling Award, and she won the SFPA poetry contest for “Calcination.” As a freelance editor, she has edited Tesseracts 17, Aurora nominated Playground of Lost Toys and Alice Unbound: Beyond Wonderland. She has co-taught the Authors Journey through Crystal Lake Entertainment, been a British Fantasy Awards, Stoker Awards, and HWA scholarship juror, and guest-edited Eye to the Telescope. A recipient of the Ladies of Horror Fiction, BC Arts Council and Canada Council grants for her writing, Colleen’s works have seen print in numerous venues and seven countries, including Polu Texni, The Pulp Horror Book of Phobias, The Beauty of Death, HWA Poetry Showcases, and Cemetery Dance. Her fiction collections, A Body of Work and Embers Amongst the Fallen, as well as her poetry collections, I Dreamed a World and The Lore of Inscrutable Dreams, are available online. She is the current president of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA) and is hard at work on more fiction and poetry collections. www.colleenanderson.wordpress.com