I didn’t like this as much as I liked Killer Verse from this series. The poems in here are about on par, I think, with a pleasing variety of styles and themes and cultures. (Though very few poems from outside the Western world and quite a lot of English literary canon types.) However, the variation between the poems didn’t seem as wide and apart from a handful that evoked a sort of melancholy or eeriness, I didn’t feel a lot of emotion reading them.

Favourites include “Der Totentanz“, “All Hallows Eve“, “The Death of Dracula”, “Because I Could Not Stop for Death”, “Goodbye to a Poltergeist”, “Gas-Lamp Ghost”, “The Wood of Suicides”, “The Whale”, and “Isis Unveiled.”

I’m not sure what else I can say about this. It’s well curated apart from the global diversity issue and the editors have done some interesting things pairing poems on the same subject or even versions of the same poem side by side. Enjoyable, even with my usual problem of having to reread poems to figure out what’s going on, and worth picking up if you’re curious, but it’s not a whole lot more than that. Killer Verse was a lot more mentally and emotionally challenging.

Warnings: Death, murder, sexual assault. One poem about the Holocaust. Possible romantically mistranslated Ancient Egyptian. Several poems that appears to simultaneously romanticize Indigenous Americans and portray them as horrifically pagan. One poem referencing the AIDS epidemic.

7/10 ( )