The Hatch

“I will do such things,” King Lear shouts before the storm, “What they are, yet I know not: but they shall be / The terrors of the earth.” Drawing upon Edmund Burke’s definition of the sublime—the odd beauty associated with fear and self-preservation; our astonished delight in what destroys, what overpowers and compels us toward darkness—these strange poems mine the sinister fault lines between weird fiction, expressionism, gothic horror, and notions of the absurd, cracking the mundane shell of our given metaphysical order. In the traditions of Nerval, Trakl, Schulz, Tadic, Poe, and contemporaries Aase Berg and Jeff Vandermeer, the wonderful disassociation brought to bear on the reader lies in the conjuring of unprecedented worlds, their myths and logics, their visions and transformations—worlds that resist interpretation almost successfully, and reveal to us the uncanny and nightmarish.

About the Author

Joe Fletcher is the author of THE HATCH (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2018), as well as two chapbooks of poetry: ALREADY IT IS DUSK (Brooklyn Arts Press) and Sleigh Ride (Factory Hollow Press). Other work can be found in jubilat, Octopus, Slope, Puerto Del Sol, Gulf Coast, Painted Bride Quarterly, and online at joefletcherpoetry.com. He teaches literature and writing at the University of North Carolina and in the North Carolina prison system, and he is the Managing Editor of the William Blake Archive.

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