This follow-up to Zachary Schomburg s acclaimed first collection of poems The Man Suit, is a book of skeleton gloves and skeleton keys at once dark and playful. With loneliness and levity Schomburg takes the reader on a tour through a liminal world of dream-logic, informed by its own myth and folklore. Here there are new kinds of trees and new ways of naming the ages jaguars and an abandoned hotel on the horizon. This book will crawl inside your chest and pump lava through your blood.
Scary, No Scary navigates a post-apocalyptic dreadscape teeming with dazzling mutants--two-hearted wolves, bears with no legs--each poem a makeshift shack in a forest where "the trees / are blood-stained / and look like old / gigantic leg bones." Here, nature is a diffuse monster, eradicating all our human effort to unyoke ourselves from a horror to which we are woefully fused. Sight and blindness are permanently amalgamated, wed across taught lines that are "part-wolf / part farm-accident." The souls of these poems have been put into them backwards. They unapologetically wear their wings on their chest, and all your hungry reading will not "push / those wings / through / to the other side.
--Lara Glenum
