We can only write what we know, whether that comes from communicating in broken French and broken English with a Parisian nurse, or staring in horror at the human effects of a geological calamity. Here are twenty years worth of dark poetry, representing a dark world, the very one we live in. These poems were written at home, at work, in the air, shipboard in the middle of the Indian Ocean, confined to a hospital bed in a foreign land, in other words, all the usual places. Influenced by Lovecraft, Zelazny, and Algernon Blackwood, among others, Kopaska-Merkel enlists his imagination and scientific background in service to poetic expressions of the wonder, horror, and magic that permeate our world.
