The Book of Whimsy (NightBallet Press 2016)

In addition to science and science fiction, I also sometimes write poetry.

I'd been writing a little bit of poetry here and there ever since I was in college, of course, but mostly not showing it to people. When I went to Clarion, Joe Haldeman got me interested in the possibilities of science fiction poetry, altough, again, I only wrote the occasional poem now and then, mostly as a way to keep writing in the bits and pieces of time that weren't enough to write stories.

In the late '80s, when I moved to the Cleveland area, I hooked up with the local poetry scene. Somewhat to my surprise, Cleveland has quite a vibrant poetry scene, and I started writing quite a bit of poetry, doing readings at local poetry venues like the Junkstock festival, and publishing in area 'zines like ArtCrimes and Icon and Coventry Reader-- as well as science fiction magazines like Asimov's and Amazing and Pulphouse. By the mid to the late '90s, as I got busy with other things, my poetry writing dwindled down (although I never completely stopped; I won the Asimov's Reader's Award, and the Rhysling award for best short poem in 2000), and had a few of my poems picked up for best-of-the-year collections and other anthologies. Then, in the early '00s, Cleveland glass artist and poet Marcus Bales started a reading series at his art gallery, Gallery 324, and invited me to be a featured reader; a year or two later, Joshua Gage informed me that I needed to be at the Deep Cleveland reading series, so I started being a regular (well, maybe an irregular) and occasionally a featured reader there. Somewhere in there, Mary and Jim Stanley and a few others discovered that there were a critical mass of SF poets within easy driving distance, and so a group of us started getting together for dinner and snacks... and critiquing poetry. So, stimulated by all the activity, I've been writing more poetry again lately...

Gallery 321 eventually closed shop, but by then Marcus had already founded a small press, VanZeno, with the goal of publishing poetry collections by some of the poets he'd featured in the readings, and other poets that he thought needed to be collected. So, to bring a long story to an end, my first collection of poems, Iron Angels, came out from VanZeno Press.

Other than my collection Iron Angels, my poems have been published in various places, including (in alphabetical order): 3Lights Quarterly, Aboriginal SF, Alchemy of Stars, Amazing Stories, Analog, Angels!, Aoife's Kiss, ArtCrimes, Asimov's SF, Astropoetica ... (click for longer (although somewhat out of date) list).

More recently, a chapbook of light poetry, The Book of Whimsy, came out from NightBallet Press in 2015.

• Read the review on Goodreads!

Photo of me reading at the Haiku deathmatch

A selection of Science Poems

• Poems on the Astropoetica site
  • "Five Pounds of Sunlight," from Asimov's, January 2011 (about the poem)
  • "& June & Croon," from Asimov's,
  • "Fireflies".
  • "The Surface of Venus".
  • Five Haiku about Astrophysics (first published as part of the "haiku contest" in Michael Bishop's novella "Cri de Coeur")
  • " Earthrise, Viewed From Meridiani, Sol 687.
• "The Spirit Rover Longs to Bask in Sunlight" from Asimov's, March 2011.
• "How the Frogs Survived, the Last Time the World Ended," from Pedestal, 64, July 2011
• "The Great Silence (Sonnet for SETI)," from James Gunn's Ad Astra, #1 (June 2012)
• "Rondel for Apollo 11," from Analog
• "In '69" (from Analog Science Fiction, September 2008)
• "Human Potential," from Asimov's

Some SF and Fantasy poems

• "Search" (from Iron Angels)
• A handful of SF Haiku (2012)
• "In the Library of Rock," from Kaleidotrope, (Spring 2012)
• "The Long Trajectory," in Electric Velocipede, issue 21-22
• "Small Conquerors," from Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction, April-May 2009
• "Landscapes," from Asimov's Science Fiction, August 2008.
• "A Month of Sundays" (poem, 1991)
• "In the Future, They Will Get Us Confused" (first appeared in Pulphouse, 1991)
• "Earthrise, Viewed From Meridiani, Sol 687," appearing in Best Poem, January 13 2009 (also in Astropoetica, Winter 2011.
• "Bearded Kalliope," (a collaboration with my wife, Mary Turzillo), in Goblin Fruit, Winter 2010 issue. (*with podcast version)
• "Stonehenge"
• "Ten Ways to Tell if Your Cat is a Space Alien" (first appeared in Asimov's SF )
  
  An excerpt from "Ten ways to tell if your cat is a Space Alien" appeared on 700 RTA busses and trains in the Cleveland area, courtesy of the Cleveland Literary Center / RTA "Minds in Motion" project.



Other poems