A review by octavia_cade
Madness by Gabriel Ojeda-Sague

challenging emotional reflective medium-paced

5.0

I love this. It's fascinating. Selected poems of a fictional poet, edited by fictional editors, and it's published fifty odd years from now, looking back into the 1990s and forward into the climate disaster that's ongoing and to come. I understand that the author was a grad student at time of writing; I hope it gave him great pleasure to create the small academic essays that accompany the poems here, especially as the conflicts and critical judgements in them are quite made-up. Goodness knows the temptation to create your own bullshit when surrounded by the library stacks. I've been there.

Despite the fact that this is a genuinely serious book about a very serious subject, there's also a strain of whimsy and almost tongue-in-cheek biography going on here too. A small sense of the ridiculous that leavens all that anxiety, even when it shades into a very realistic sort of horror. That's my favourite part of this, I think. I read Leaving Miami and liked it a lot, but this is even better. I'm so glad I bought it.

Extended review to come in Strange Horizons.