Cemetery Tour

0/5 ( ratings)

Poetry chapbook, poems related to mortality and the macabre.

12 poems which have as their inspiration poets like Joseph Payne Brennan and pessimists from the confessional school.

“John Allen’s Cemetery Tour is an exploration, a study of haunting. This collection is ominous with illness. Death is not just death, it is transformed: “Death is a vocation, “death’s a traveling circus”. We are gifted so many surprising images and sonic wordplay, such as the “lunar jazz” that plays in our minds as we read on. We get “shattered laughter” “eating at the heels”, the character of shade stalking the speaker throughout. “Hell’s small hands” play with us all with its “pragmatic puppetry”, “aural assault”, and “dizzy ghost’s flight”. We are in a pleasurable sonic limbo, where all of us get to eventually become the shade.” –Clayre Benzadon, author of Liminal Zenith from SuRvision Books, and winner of the 2019 Alfred Boas award.

“A chapbook of dark surreal poetry. These poems are intense, dense, rich in imagery, imagination, and allusion. Allen lets his skills as a surreal wordsmith shine in this short yet strikingly provocative collection. Fair warning to the reader! Give these poems a chance and their darkness will get under your skin and invade your own imagination.” –Bruce Boston, SFPA Grand Master, author of Surrealities.

“In this new group of extraordinary poems, John Allen literarily whistles his way through the graveyard, dazzling with dark tones drawn from his moribund surrounds. Having stolen the Sphinx’s sapphire eye, he finds his way to Lautréamont’s tomb; there he allows himself to be swallowed whole by the spirit of Maldoror, then fights his way out by rhythmic slashes of the pen, emerging at last with the host’s spleen in his teeth.” –Alan Gullette, author of Footnotes To Th