David C. Kopaska-Merkel

This is an awesome collection of speculative poetry: verse short and long in the realms of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. As with any anthology this large, there was a wide range of styles and themes as well as some poems that didn't quite do it for me. But the vast majority are at least well-written, and there are some amazing pieces in here that made me stop and think about a specific aspect of the human condition. That is the power of speculative poetry-using fantastic imagery from other worlds to comment on our own-and many of the poets featured here do it well. Maybe one year I'll read the Rhysling Anthology in time to vote, but I am always happy to read work from some poets I already enjoy and discover some wonderful talent new to me, which this collection (at 200 pages and 95 poets!) was great for :)… (meer)

As I did last year, I read the collection first to scan for any standouts. I then read each item closely to see how each one stacks up on its own merits, then read through the ones receiving favorable marks to see which ones really felt like they deserved special recognition as an award, then finally a pass to rank my top three in both the short and the long categories. I noticed that while there were many which featured a strong speculative sense, there was about 10-20% which didn't feel tied to either science fiction, fantasy, or horror. Some of these might have had a name-check or a mention of some technological item in the real world, but to me that would not be enough for a poem to be considered one of the best of the year in these genres. The ones which made it all the way through my process all had something sticky that I would keep returning to, an intriguing take on their subjects or a nice turn of phrase or a bold breezy attitude that I found attractive, and to me this was interesting because of how hard it is to write a good poem that features these sorts of elements naturally.
As for the authors, there are quite a few names I recognize as having been around for years now, but the majority are ones I didn't find familiar, with their work appearing in venues I might not know a lot about. I like it that no one small group of publications has a lock on science fiction/fantasy/horror poetry, which I can see has spores that travel far. The anthology and award have been around over forty years now and I think these have a shot at continuing for a good long time to come.… (meer)