The Masque of Amontillado and Other Poems and Short Fiction

In the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe comes this wide-ranging collection of poems and short fiction. The title poem is told from behind the crypt wall in Poe’s classic story of wine and revenge. Other poems feature a robot movie star who goes berserk, despotic angels and aliens, a vampire wine connoisseur, Ophelia’s final exit and Claudius’s self-justification, the sinister side of suburbia, heavens that are not heaven and hells that are not hell, a painter going through the looking glass, a poem that is desperate to be read, the White City at the Chicago World’s Fair, the dance of matter and antimatter, and a form that asks you to list the last five occasions on which you blew your nose. There are paranoid visions of obscure menace, meditations on art, language, and the contradictions of American dreams, sly satires, and journeys into Gothic madness. This book also includes the short play “Mask Behind the Face,” about a serial killer who might be a goddess, and introduces two new poem-writing techniques, the crossword poem and the substitution poem.