Vamps (A Retrospective) Re-Edition Released by Alien Buddha

Began the description, [i]t won’t have the wonderful illustrations by Marge Simon, and will have an entirely different cover, but this was to be a quick, “low-frills” republication of my long out-of-print poetry book, VAMPS (A RETROSPECTIVE), cf. just below, October 21. But the poems themselves will all be there, even if not all listed on a formal table of contents (see October 24). And now it’s out in a new edition by Alien Buddha Press, its Amazon description a simple quoted poem, also on the back cover of the book itself:

CRAVING

Is it so bad a thing,
this lust that haunts me?
A blood-washed sunset that courses a broken arch
through stone-rimmed casements,
presaging stars,
a moon-dimpled coquette, laughing as clouds
scud a midnight sky — ah!
The blue of Heavens’ depth, purpling
comet-lanced,
planets spinning in, yes
sanguine darkness
that wraps eternal. Now tell me
is it so bad, breathing the night air,
God’s own wind wrapping my arms
in another’s soul
sipping not stinking tavern Sauternes,
but finest claret?

If this one should tempt you to want to read more, the book contains over seventy additional poems, on vampire and vampire-adjacent topics from Max Shreck’s Count Orlock in NOSFERATU, in a dedicatory “Blood Portrait,” to a disadvantage to near-immortality as discovered by a “turned” Mina Harker in a post-Dracula “Chagrin Du Vampire.” But not all are movie or book vampires either, as entries also include a Medusa, an esthete, a vampiress complaining about blood-stained clothing, one “turned” on a European vacation, vampire hobbies, jazz, the list continues. . . .

There is one warning, as noted above it is a “no-frills” copy, missing such things as a table of contents which might have been handy (there is a list of acknowledgements up front, up to the book’s original 2011 appearance via Sam’s Dot Publishing, but after that — the poems themselves in a roughly chronological order, though with some exceptions — you’re on your own for a little over the book’s final quarter). But looked at another way, there’s some joy too in the “discovery” aspect of what amounts to a kind of forced browsing.

But to cut to the chase, you can go to the Amazon page yourself for more information by simply pressing here. While for more, the price listed is only $11.50.