DESCENT INTO LIGHT: Mike Allen’s Home Page

The first issue of Inkscrawl has just appeared, featuring a creepy little poem called “Unland, Unlife,” which I wrote based on a dream my wife had. Several other good pieces in this issue, though I feel a need to call special attention to Rose Lemberg’s

The latest podcast from Hugo Award-winning StarShipSofa features the second installment of Diane Severson’s Poetry Planet, which, in the name of exploring the theme of “first contact,” contains two of my poems, “The Thing in the Gutter” and “On Discovery of a Habitable World.” The

My poem “Splendours to Devour” has just appeared in the June issue of Ideomancer. It’s a rather quirky end-of-the-world poem, inspired in part by a conversation with my pal Nicole Kornher-Stace. If you like it, I hope you’ll leave a comment there.

Last week I mentioned a poetry sale to a market so new it didn’t yet have an URL. Well, inkscrawl now has a URL, http://www.inkscrawl.net/, where submission guidelines can be found. Go check them out.

My brain is scrambled by the opposing forces of a virus invasion and the drugs that fight them, but I’m just coherent enough to make mention that I’ve sold another of the “Claire-dare” poems, “Heart’s Delight,” to Not One of Us. This poem in particular

Just a quick note that next edition of “Poetry Planet” at StarShipSofa will, as I understand, contain two poems by me, that you could call Golden Oldies: “On Discovery of a Habitable World” (which is, actually, the first sf poem I ever wrote, though it

I’m pleased to announce that a short, eerie poem I co-wrote with Anita (her idea, my words) called “Unland, Unlife” has just sold to the electronic poetry zine inkscrawl, edited by Mitchell Hart, which is so new it doesn’t yet have a URL. More information

T.J. McIntyre’s Southern Fried Weirdness: Reconstruction — all proceeds from which go to the Red Cross to help with tornado relief in the South — is out now on Smashwords and Amazon Kindle, with stories and poems from a cutting edge and up-and-coming roster including

Sam Tomaino at SF Revu tackles the stories in Apex Magazine 23 and makes mention of my “Button Bin“: “The Button Bin” by Mike Allen (originally appeared in Helix: Speculative Fiction Quarterly, 2007) is quite the horror story. Our narrator is after a man named

I learned tonight, to my delight, that Fantastique Unfettered is also accepting my poem “Binary.” This is a surreal, dark magic- and dark relationship-themed piece, another of the “Claire-dare” poems, inspired by this painting shown to me by Claire Cooney.