Screaming in Code

Have you ever read Thomas Wiloch? If not, maybe you should. Don't just take my word for it. Thomas Ligotti says Wiloch is writing "what deserve to be included among the best prose poems ever written in any language." And like Ligotti, Wiloch has been quietly working away in relative obscurity in his own "niche" for two decades, developing a one-of-a-kind approach to a form he almost entirely owns. Wiloch writes surrealist short-short pieces, often no longer than a page long, that are as philosophical as they are whimsical, as clever as they are poetic, and as disturbing as they…

A Troika of Weirdness

I've been dying to get the word out about three intriguing (and vastly different) titles before they fall off the literary radar. First up is John Edward Lawson's new poetry collection, The Troublesome Amputee. I wrote the introduction to this book, which I have to say is one of the weirdest and goriest collections of literary poetry I've ever read. Lawson, a writer at the forefront of the "bizarro" movement, really comes of age as a poet in this collection, which features topics ranging from the most successful scatological poem I've ever read (a piece about zombies tongues that travel…