Poetry Collections

Camp Kaatskill near the small New York town of Wildham was once an idyllic spot for summer and fall getaways. Surrounded by a wild thicket of black walnut, aspen, and evergreen, reflected by the reservoir and overshadowed by its dam. Camp Kaatskill seemed like the perfect destination for young Rachel Starck to spend her summer interning and experiencing the world beyond England.

But this Catskill hamlet harbors a dark secret, a sordid past, and an ancient curse that demands a blood toll each summer. Unbeknownst to Rachel, her own familial history is intricately entwined with that of Wildham, and her arrival will spark a conflagration of murder and mayhem unlike any the town has seen before.

Told in verse and prose poetry, Mason Gorey: A Haunting Catskill Elegy is an epic serial killer yarn; a tragedy; an exercise in monstrosity and brutality that culminates in an achingly human story.

Dracula Found is a retelling of Bram Stoker’s Dracula in verse using only words within each chapter to relate the tale. Whilst it is a story of a vampire, it is ultimately the story of Mina Harker. Transylvania awaits …

Like evolution itself, nothing about the story in these pages was born of a plan. It’s a collection of “What ifs.” The authors didn’t discuss the story in advance, they simple performed it.
The penultimate premise?
What if the biblical progenitors of humanity were bent on its eventual destruction?
The answer is here between these covers, in the form of a heavy-metal armageddon meltdown fueled by rage, passion, firepower, and hellfire. This is epic poetry like you’ve never read before—irreverent, gruesome, horrifying, heartrending. It will make you think, and it will clarify the meaning of the phrase:

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned

Found poetry is an act of creation in its own right. By taking words already in existence in the works of others, something completely new can be created.
This collection was created in tribute to renowned dark poets, Linda D. Addison and Alessandro Manzetti. In all instances, we have indicated those poems from which we carved our own.

Metallurgy is an homage to the world of heavy metal and its related genres.

In these pages are 100 dark found poems created from the lyrics of bands as varied as Nine Inch Nails, Metallica, Korn, Behemoth and many more.

Although all poems are completely original works, the sources have been fully acknowledged and it is hoped that after reading the poems, the reader will then go on to listen to the artists who inspired them. \m/

There is more to dying than the stopping of breath. There is more to life than just a beating heart.
Should the values that make us human die, should we lose ourselves, then we are no more than dead men walking.
In these pages are poems of murder and madness alongside more intangible deaths. Humans have turned dying into an art form.

When I was a child, I thought as a child
And read the poems of Mother Goose,
But when I became a grown-up,
I let my darker side run loose.

In these pages you will find the Muffin Man,
the Muffin Man, the Muffin Man,
and what he put in his muffin pan,
in his house in Drury Lane.

You will see how the saw silences Margery,
how Miss Polly likes to bite, bite, bite.
So many twists to the rhymes,
to be read in bed at night.

Are you ready children?
Mother Hubbard’s here.
Turn the page and you will find,
there are even more monsters near.

Note this collection is an expansion of those first published in the book Dark is my Playground.

Words are meant to be played with and there are many to be found in my playground. They have gathered together to form verses belonging to the dark and have twisted old nursery rhymes into unexpected forms. The Deceiver is the Master of Ceremonies in this rewritten world, let him read you poems cloaked in night’s shades, those tales of murder and loss, betrayal and abandonment. Let him take you to those old nursery rhymes, climb the stairs with a candle, wait for the axe …