DESCENT INTO LIGHT: Mike Allen’s Home Page

Monday brings me two new precious things. First, my new poem “La Donna del Lago,” dedicated to Claire (C.S.E.) Cooney, has appeared at Strange Horizons. Fitting, as it’s the last of the “Claire-dare” poems that she inspired (though not the last to appear in print.)

A new website, Versification, chartered by Erzebet YellowBoy Carr, posts reviews of speculative poetry. The site debuted this week, and three of its reviews, all reprints, concern me: there’s Amal El-Mohtar’s review of my last collection, The Journey to Kailash; Deborah J. Brannon’s review of

Bull Spec poetry editor Dan Campbell offers a review of the poems in the upcoming Fantastique Unfettered 3, and makes mention of the interview with me that’s appearing there. …do read it for a hint of how Allen performs his poems and an insight into

Yesterday Alexa Seidel with Fantastique Unfettered informed me she’ll be adding my poem “Seed the Earth, Burn the Sky” to the pair (“Sisyphus Crawls,” “Binary”) she already has lined up for the Nov./Dec. issue, making it a triptych. I also understand the issue’s cover will

After a week full of rejections for both new poems and new stories — so it goes — I finished up with a nice poetry sale, to Strange Horizons. The poem is called “La Donna del Lago,” and it’s dedicated to Claire Cooney. It was

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