The Day Dali Died: Poetry and Flash Fiction

by Jeff Vandermeer

In this new collection from World Fantasy Award-winner Jeff VanderMeer, car accidents, Angkor Wat, dead whales, flower vendors, dogcatchers, classic television shows, frogs, and the moon are transformed by the author's imagination into something unique and magical. Showcaseing his Rhysling Award-winning poem "Flight," reprinted in Nebula Awards 30, The Day Dali Died also provides a selection of short-short fictions- including "Bullets and Airplanes," "The County Fair," and "How Benjobi Song Came to Rule Iphagenia" (original to this collection). From lost books to mythic journeys into the surreal, The Day Dali Died showcases VanderMeer's talent for both epiphany and precise detail.

Genres: Poetry, Anthologies

124 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

NYT bestselling writer Jeff VanderMeer has been called “the weird Thoreau” by the New Yorker for his engagement with ecological issues. His most recent novel, the national bestseller Borne, received wide-spread critical acclaim and his prior novels include the Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance). Annihilation won the Nebula and Shirley Jackson Awards, has been translated into 35 languages, and was made into a film from Paramount Pictures directed by Alex Garland. His nonfiction has appeared in New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Atlantic, Slate, Salon, and the Washington Post. He has coedited several iconic anthologies with his wife, the Hugo Award winning editor. Other titles include Wonderbook, the world’s first fully illustrated creative writing guide. VanderMeer served as the 2016-2017 Trias Writer in Residence at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. He has spoken at the Guggenheim, the Library of Congress, and the Arthur C. Clarke Center for the Human Imagination.

VanderMeer was born in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, but spent much of his childhood in the Fiji Islands, where his parents worked for the Peace Corps. This experience, and the resulting trip back to the United States through Asia, Africa, and Europe, deeply influenced him.

Jeff is married to Ann VanderMeer, who is currently an acquiring editor at Tor.com and has won the Hugo Award and World Fantasy Award for her editing of magazines and anthologies. They live in Tallahassee, Florida, with two cats and thousands of books.

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5. Some 5 star moments like the poem "We Underground" and a review of an imaginary children's book by Cormac McCarthy (called Sarah's New Pony), but on the whole a mixed bag, as one might expect from such a collection.

[ECH · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tried reading the poems out loud with no prep. Cried. The poems about the moon and statues both stood out. So now I am giving the book full marks even though it has some problems (one remark about a fundamentalist being attracted to someone he didn't expect which was probably more acceptable in 2003 and was far from the worst execution of that trope Ive seen but ehhh).

[neko cam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Poetry isn't usually my cup of tea, but 'Lassie' and 'Gilligan's Island Revisited' were unlike any poetry I've read before. Quirky and humorous, they explore a darker take on those light and cheerful shows - incorporating violent insanity, animal abuse, cannibalism, and the like. The other piece of verse that I feel is deserving of particular mention is the titular 'The Day Dali Died'. It is so succinct, so concise, and yet it conjures imagery so complete in its surreality as to do justice to its strange subject-matter.

Of the 'flash fiction' (a term to whose use I've quickly warmed), there are similarly three stories that stand out. 'The Songs a Dead Whale Sings' is a peculiar piece that starts out mildly disturbing and only becomes more deliciously so as it progresses. 'The Flower Vendor' is a curious exploration of what amounts to a single moment in time; the creation and exploration of a narrative almost entirely void of chronological progression intrigues me. And lastly, 'Bullets and Airplanes' is a bitter-sweet piece of enthralling stream-of-consciousness prose that is as flecked with madness as it with (fabricated?) interesting facts and figures.

All-in-all it's an enjoyable, albeit somewhat eclectic, collection that's very easy to digest. It is thanks to the diminutive size of each piece of content that I really didn't mind whenever I read a poem or story that I felt was not great, because I'd invested so little time and thought that I did not feel cheated. However, those gems that were truly amazing were so despite the confines of their bantam stature - that is to say that they were such concentrated awesome that it didn't matter that they were short-lived.