Cemetery Tour –– by John Thomas Allen

“John Allen’s Cemetery Tour is an exploration, a study of haunting. This collection is ominous with illness. Death is not just death, it is transformed: “Death is a vocation, “death’s a traveling circus”. We are gifted so many surprising images and sonic wordplay, such as the “lunar jazz” that plays in our minds as we read on. We get “shattered laughter” “eating at the heels”, the character of shade stalking the speaker throughout. “Hell’s small hands” play with us all with its “pragmatic puppetry”, “aural assault”, and “dizzy ghost’s flight”. We are in a pleasurable sonic limbo, where all of us get to eventually become the shade.”   –Clayre Benzadon, author of Liminal Zenith from SuRvision Books, and winner of the 2019 Alfred Boas award.

“A chapbook of dark surreal poetry. These poems are intense, dense, rich in imagery, imagination, and allusion. Allen lets his skills as a surreal wordsmith shine in this short yet strikingly provocative collection. Fair warning to the reader! Give these poems a chance and their darkness will get under your skin and invade your own imagination.” –Bruce Boston, SFPA Grand Master, author of Surrealities. 

“In this new group of extraordinary poems, John Allen literarily whistles his way through the graveyard, dazzling with dark tones drawn from his moribund surrounds. Having stolen the Sphinx’s sapphire eye, he finds his way to Lautréamont’s tomb; there he allows himself to be swallowed whole by the spirit of Maldoror, then fights his way out by rhythmic slashes of the pen, emerging at last with the host’s spleen in his teeth.” –Alan Gullette, author of Footnotes To The Obvious and  I Grew These Hueless Clouds in the Dreary South.

From the text:

FATUM

NUMQUAM

FALLATEUR

I WILL RISE UP THE DEAD, AND THEY WILL DEVOUR THE LIVING

I WILL MAKE THE DEAD OUTNUMBER THE LIVING!

GILGAMESH—ISHTAR

The people have sold themselves
as toothless, syphilitic whores.

Shadow groves spill in Rorschach
canals, the Harm Imaginarium always

accruing the dizzy specter of what
will come next. The cufflink you loved

rusts on the voudon’s spider hand,
his last victim falling apart
in a danse macabre

on his grave, screaming your name!
And from beginning to special end
it will be as though it were only

you

any of this had happened to.

24 pgs. on broad Side-Stapled 8.5″x11″. March. A.Da. 107. (2023 Anti-Vulgar)
$4.00 +s/h or contact to trade.