Featured Poem II • June 2015
A Portrait of the Monster as an Artist
Dominik Parisien
For Helen Marshall
It knows poetry is subjective, that one creature’s poem is the art that beats at the heart of another. At times it fancies itself a fanged Eliot, ripping subject from context to gestate new meaning. It remembers hungering for a greater capacity for abstraction gorging itself on organs of expression, how as it ate it dreamt of expanding to encompass thoughts on all things that never were. (It hears it mastered only the delicate methods of outrageous violence). It believes an aesthetic appreciation of the monstrous is not for their like; that the day they explore the canvas of its body will reveal nothing they would call wondrous.
Dominik Parisien is an editor, poet, and writer. His fiction and poetry have appeared in Strange Horizons, Shock Totem, Ideomancer, Lackington’s, Tesseracts 17, Imaginarium 2013: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing, and other venues. Dominik also edited Clockwork Canada (an anthology of Canadian steampunk forthcoming from Exile Editions), and he provides editorial support to Cheeky Frawg Books, is the poetry editor for Postscripts to Darkness, and is a former editorial assistant for Weird Tales.
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