The Hatch

by Joe Fletcher

Overview

Poetry. Horror. I will do such things, King Lear shouts before the storm, What they are, yet I know not: but they shall be / The terrors of the earth. Drawing upon Edmund Burke's definition of the sublime--the odd beauty associated with fear and self-preservation; our astonished delight in what destroys, what overpowers and compels us toward darkness--these strange poems mine the sinister fault lines between weird fiction, expressionism, gothic horror, and notions of the absurd, cracking the mundane shell of our given metaphysical order. In the traditions of Nerval, Trakl, Schulz, Tadi?, Poe, and contemporaries Aase Berg and Jeff Vandermeer, the wonderful disassociation brought to bear on the reader lies in the conjuring of unprecedented worlds, their myths and logics, their visions and transformations--worlds that resist interpretation almost successfully, and reveal to us the uncanny and nightmarish.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781936767540
Publisher:	Brooklyn Arts Press
Publication date:	06/01/2018
Pages:	120
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.28(d)

About the Author

Joe fletcher is the author of two chapbooks of poetry: Already It Is Dusk (Brooklyn Arts Press) and Sleigh Ride (Factory Hollow Press). Other work can be found in jubilat, Octopus, Slope, Puerto Del Sol, Gulf Coast, Painted Bride Quarterly, and online at joefletcherpoetry.com. He teaches literature and writing at the University of North Carolina and in the North Carolina prison system, and he is the Managing Editor of the William Blake Archive.

Editorial Reviews

05/21/2018
Fletcher conjures a dizzying array of fantastical and macabre imagery in his debut collection, which features lyric narratives and flash fictions that evoke the original versions of the Grimms’ fairy tales, Pagan rituals, and horror films. His speakers chronicle violently losing limbs, being buried alive, and receiving sustenance from “dripping forests/ of meat trees.” One speaker is summoned into a van by gray-faced strangers, while another witnesses the trial and execution of a cow for some unnamed and unpardonable crime. The title poem centers on a character, referred to as “The student,” finding a disembodied but animate human head in a pile of leaves. Fletcher deals in common horror tropes (“A red-haired clown slumped/ atop a wall beside the monastery”), but his vague suggestions (“Something danced through the windy forest”) are often the most unsettling. Structural variations keep the collection interesting, and Fletcher impresses with his sense of rhythm and use of alliteration: “Nightlong the sickly sea sludged/ against the sagging sea-wall.” A poem called “Hoopoe Balm” describes a mysterious plant in arresting and confounding detail, with leaves shimmering in the wind “like champagne at the feast of the Queen of Sheba” and a scent “like the spit of a tubercular child.” Fletcher’s inventive and technically proficient collection is as wicked as it is weird. (June)

Publishers Weekly