Synopsis:
Hold your screams and enter a world of seasonal creatures, dreams of bones, and confessions modeled from open eyes and endless insomnia. Christina Sng’s A Collection of Nightmares is a poetic feast of sleeplessness and shadows, an exquisite exhibition of fear and things better left unsaid. Here are ramblings at the end of the world and a path that leads to a thousand paper cuts at the hands of a skin carver. There are crawlspace whispers, and fresh sheets gently washed with sacrifice and poison, and if you’re careful in this ghost month, these poems will call upon the succubus to tend to your flesh wounds and scars.
These nightmares are sweeping fantasies that electrocute the senses as much as they dull the ache of loneliness by showing you what’s hiding under your bed, in the back of your closet, and inside your head. Sng’s poems dissect and flower, her autopsies are delicate blooms dressed with blood and syntax. Her words are charcoal and cotton, safe yet dressed in an executioner’s garb.
Dream carefully.
You’ve already made your bed.
The nightmares you have now will not be kind.
And you have no one to blame but yourself.
Edition:
Paperback
My Thoughts:
Welp, apparently I really do like poetry in spite of my protestations. Yet again, I’m reviewing a phenomenal bit of writing from Raw Dog Screaming Press. As you can probably tell from the above Instagram post, I had a lot of poems/passages marked out.
A few of my particular favorites were:
Exquisite
Seasonal Creatures
The Art of Weaving
The Bone Carver
They Do Not Sleep
Dreams of Bone
The Fall
The Monolith
There’s a surprising amount of range in the poems collected here – both in subject (which pretty much runs the full gamut of horror from monsters to the apocalypse), and in form – some poems rhyme, others don’t; some flow lyrically, while others feel a little bit like jotted down thoughts or even very short but otherwise more traditional stories.
Mommy sat daily at her spinning wheel
Weaving reams of human skin
From the dust we slept in.
They’re all a little scary, but beautiful too. Even the worst subjects become alluring when Sng writes about them.
About the Author (from Goodreads):
Christina Sng is a poet, writer and artist. Her work has received honourable mentions in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and nominations for the Dwarf Stars and Rhysling Awards. She is the author of several chapbooks, including Dark Dreams (2011) and A Constellation of Songs (2016). Her first two full-length poetry collections from Alban Lake Publishing and Raw Dog Screaming Press were published in 2016.
Rating:
The poetry is lovely – written in a variety of styles, and covering a variety of horror-related topics – these two things combined keeps every page feeling fresh and fascinating. This is a great read by a massively talented poet.
A Collection of Nightmares By Christina Sng Raw Dog Screaming Press ISBN: 9781935738985 Published: July 12, 2017 Paperback 88 Pages Publisher's Website
