Nicholas Diak's Reviews > A Collection of Nightmares

Christina Sng’s A Collection of Nightmares is a poetry book containing forty seven dark and apocalyptic poems. The book won the 2018 Bram Stoker Award of Best Poetry Collection, and rightly so: the first half of the collection contains wonderfully executed horror poetry while the final half is devoted to apocalyptic subjects that convey a sense of excitement as the world ends in disastrous ways.

The beginning of A Collection of Nightmares focuses on non-gothic horror poems. Much of these poems deal with nature and animals (“Seasonal Creatures,” “A Mosquito’s Tale”), and fiendish folks capable of malevolent acts (“Confession,” “Snow Tomb”). Starting with “The Fall” on page 53, the rest of A Collection of Nightmares is devoted to post-apocalyptic narratives, including asteroids crashing into Earth (“The Journey”), alien invasions (“The Dissection”), zombies (“Children in the Apocalypse”), and contagions, floods (“Underwater”) and so on. Civilization does not fare well on most of these poems, though a few, such as “Children in the Apocalypse” end with hints of optimism.

Throughout Sng’s poems, there’s a few common themes. Cats are prominent, whether they are the plushy variety that calm children, of the protagonist of the story who survives the apocalypse while munching on his owner. Children are also a focal point as many poems involve the protection of them from the nightmarish forces present in many of them. There’s a few references to Peter Pan and other fairy tales. There’s also a few instances of black humour in Sng’s work, such as the poem “The Atomizer and the Matchbox” devoted to an atomizer that allows folks to shrink their enemies down and nets its inventor a Noble Peace Prize. Over all, the entire collection is cohesive with its selection of poems, some are adventurous and others tragic, but all are expertly crafted and easily visualized when read.