For more than four decades, Michael Fantina has been delighted readers around the world with his vibrant, meticulously crafted poetry. This is the first volume to present a generous sampling of his verse, and it establishes him as a leading voice in the thriving genre of weird poetry.
What distinguishes Fantina's poetry is not only an effortless mastery of many different verse forms (the sonnet, the quatrain, the ballad) but its imaginative range and its power to evoke fantasy, terror, and wonder with telling word-choice and evocative imagery. The influence of H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, and other classic weird poets is strong, but Fantina retains his own unique voice in poems that run the gamut from supernatural horror to pure fantasy to fusions of weirdness and romance.
If lupine women sue me through the glade
At dusk when all the trees will bend and look,
I'd be awake in dreams by this cool brook
And dally with a nymph deep in the shade.
Her long and golden hair I would unbraid;
Her belt of crimson leather I'd unhook,
And kiss her throat and shoulder at the crook—
Yet of those werewolf women I'm afraid.
—From "Lycanthropy at Dusk"
Michael Fantina's poetry has appeared in Nyctalops, Dark Horizons, Midnight Echo, Spectral Realms, and many other magazines and anthologies. His short fiction has appeared in Strange Sorcery, Lovecraft's Disciples, and other venues.
