Thought Against Tomorrow

Here is a small piece of my soul I pulled out and shaped like this. It is still bleeding, but only a little. It won't mess your hands much. And you can wash them after.

For years Hugo and Nebula award winning writer Jo Walton has been writing poems and posting them on the internet, first on usenet, then on livejournal, and lately on her Patreon. Some of them are funny, some of them are sad, some of them are fantastical, others are about everyday life.

This is an extensive collection of her work from 1996-2020 containing hundreds of poems, all dated and organized into thematic sections: Love Pain and Death, New Myths For Old Gold, Red As Blood, By Their Spaceships Ye Shall Know Them, Shakespeare, The News, The Turning Year, and Whimsy. It also has a table of contents and an index of first lines.

Some of them have been collected before in Starlings and other poetry collections, but this is the first time it's been possible to purchase reams and reams of them. If there's one thing Walton's eclectic work is known for it's the element of "where did that come from".

Here we have a poem where lions are made extinct by being persecuted by martyrs, one where Jane Austen marries King Canute, and one where a skydiving friend's death is memorialised by the idea that she has fallen up into the sky. You may never know what to expect, but you won't be bored, and they have pretty much perfect scansion.