Demeter Diaries
'The Demeter Diaries' is a record of love and longing and the inevitable horror that arises between the minds of Mina Harker and Vlad Dracula as they court one another in waking dreams. The dialogue, written in both poetry and prose, imagines a psychic connection that develops between the two even before Dracula arrives in England. As Dracula makes his way from Transylvania to Whitby on the doomed ship Demeter, the two would-be lovers transmit their thoughts across the waves and lands that separate them, alternately wooing and terrifying one another with the idea of love eternal and all the dark delicacies necessary to ensure it.
Front cover art by Wendy Saber Core, interior illustrations by Luke Spooner
The Monstrance
The Monstrance, Bryan D. Dietrich’s sixth book of poems, is a love story. Set in the world of James Whale’s 1931 film version of Frankenstein, these poems document the lives and loves of a monster and a gypsy, a huffy hunchback, a lame priest, and the not-so-mad scientist himself. What begins with test tubes and Tesla coils ends in grace and graveyard picnics. Heartwarming and horrifying, love itself is resurrected here and set striding, a lost creature, livid and longing, but never alone.
Prime Directive
PRIME DIRECTIVE is about Star Trek. It’s about ten year-olds and Talos IV, Kirk and Klingons, captains and colonels.
…It’s about a suddenly single Air Force father who introduces his son to a TV show, one that brings them both together, offers them both new life if not new civilization, preparing them both to go where neither has gone before. Prime Directive is a book about a man with Alzheimer’s who doesn’t have long before beaming out of this world, but it’s also about his son, a father himself now, learning how to take the helm once his captain, his Colonel. is gone.
Starting to Nod
With Starting to Nod book Bryan Dietrich will be recognized as one of the leading poets of his generation. In the Bible the land of Nod, “east of Eden,” is where Cain goes into exile, and the sense of a post-lapsarian exile in this book is strong. The poems arise as a result of a head-on encounter between the family romance and sociological forces; between mythology and history; between traditional and popular culture; between science and sci-fi. Dietrich calls on both high and low registers of American diction and uses classic poetic measures as a springboard for his own syncopated riffs, the result stimulating to the ear and the mind. You could describe him as a hybrid of James Merrill and David Foster Wallace, but the work is so distinctively his own, it seems fair to characterize his poems as, simply, “Dietrichean.”
–Alfred Corn, author of Unions
Love Craft
Love Craft
H. P. Lovecraft, dark god of the Gothic, taught us about the beasts under our beds, about the worlds behind our wallpaper, about the secret stains in all our haunted homes. Bryan D. Dietrich’s new volume of poems dusts beneath those same beds, tears at the same wallpaper, and runs screaming into the history of those same houses. Dietrich’s poems, like Lovecraft’s stories, show us the fathers and mothers of our terror, but they also ask: Is there something in their tortured tales we can craft at last into love?
“Demonstrating a mastery of style, a deep sense of literary roots, and a marvelous grasp of Lovecraftian imagery, Bryan Dietrich may well be the top practitioner of horror poetry writing today.” —Lawrence C. Connolly, author of Veins
“Bryan Dietrich’s poems are lambent, insinuating, delicately threatening. His control of language is fine and measured, the danger, loss and desire subtly intertwined, the stuff of relished nightmare. This is a sensitive book, testimony to the enormity of the ongoing loss of his father, imaged in the pulp scifi, horror, comic book, film images they shared. Domestic horror merges with details of damage — only Bryan would rhyme ‘shudder, larder, murder.’ As he says: ‘Open the book, brace yourself, say the spell.'” —Gina Wisker, Brighton, UK, author of Horror Fiction & editor of Dissections
“This brilliant and powerful book steers the reader to both the subject of these poems, the craft of love, a craft largely unknown to the inhabitants of these poems, and to the symbolic world of creeping horror found in the work of H. P. Lovecraft. The framework of universal horror provided by the Lovecraft cosmos gives the whole more depth and a larger perspective that extends the suffering to all of us.” —David Lunde, winner of the Rhysling Award
Single Bound
(New edition coming soon from a new press)
For those who love Superman and Wonder Woman--and who enjoy diving deep into the mythological history of superheroes, considering the ways that they both experience and reflect the best and worst our human condition--comes this double collection of poems, SINGLE BOUND. The first book in Bryan D. Dietrich's collection, Krypton Nights, won the prestigious Paris Review Prize in Poetry in 2001, and it receives a fresh treatment here. The second book, Amazon Days, makes its debut at a moment when women's identities and experiences are at the forefront of cultural conversation. These two superheroes, speaking within this combined collection of formal persona poems, have much to say to each other and to all of us.
Out of Print
The Assumption
The Assumption
The Assumption
Krypton Nights
The Assumption
The Assumption
Universal Monsters
Universal Monsters
Universal Monsters
Drawn to Marvel
Universal Monsters
Universal Monsters
