Psalms and Sorceries

In recent years, Wade German has established himself at the very pinnacle of contemporary weird poetry. This new poetry collection, following his scintillating debut volume, Dreams from a Black Nebula (Hippocampus Press, 2014), shows why every poem by German is a crystallized jewel of potent weirdness. German draws upon the rich heritage of literary strangeness extending back to the Hebrew scriptures and continuing on through such writers as Mary Shelley, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Robert W. Chambers, and H. P. Lovecraft. Even more distinctively, in such poems as "Scylla and Charybdis" and "Gorgonum Chaos" German finds weirdness in the obscurer corners of Greek mythology, with its bizarre monsters and the forbidding underworld of Hades. This theme provides the inspiration for the verse drama that concludes the book, Children of Hypnos, where witches, ghosts, and even more eccentric creatures frolic in the graveyards of Thessaly. Wade German's effortless skill at numerous verse forms (sonnet, quatrain, ballad) is matched by his dynamic weird imagination. Each of his poems is a miniature horror tale that does far more than coin a shudder: it tells disturbing truths about our own precarious status between the living and the dead.