I am as unapologetic a pop culture junkie as you’re ever likely to meet. The inspiration for the collection came from an intersection of this deep well of pop-art knowledge and the weightier themes I wanted to explore through poetry. Employing that knowledge of the arts, particularly film, from my childhood and adolescence, I was able to give poetic voice to the themes of grief, abandonment, loneliness, and the idea of otherness. There is an Igmar Bergman quote that opens—and anchors—the collection that speaks to this idea of just how invaluable film is to opening up our subconscious:
“Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.”
Pop culture permeates Demo Reels. From borrowed song titles from bands like The Motels and The Style Council to the myriad cinematic Easter eggs sprinkled liberally throughout, the collection definitely captures the nerd zeitgeist of the 1980s.
“Verse with the girth of prose. Poems wearing coats made of both bones and bows. Liaguno reveals sadnesses behind the same curtain that obscures ecstasies: nothing is sacred, everything is sacred. Here there’s a dance with language in a hall that has no ceiling. The collection’s greatest strength is getting readers to view the world through a new rhythmic prism, impossible to ignore once felt; in a word: poetically.”
—Josh Malerman
New York Times bestselling author of Bird Box and Incidents Around the House
“Like a seafaring Sigourney Weaver—which is one of a whole book of on-point references in here—Vince Liaguno sails out into the turbid, frothy waters of horror, and what he comes back with are these poems, which we can all feast on.”
—Stephen Grahan Jones
New York Times bestselling author of I Was a Teenage Slasher, The Only Good Indians, and the Indian Lake Trilogy
“Vince Liaguno’s debut poetry collection transports the reader by way of dark poetic vignettes, each piece its own cinematic vision that are both familiar and chilling to the bone. Every line puts the reader on the edge of their seat as if they were watching each stanza unfold on some shadowy silver screen.”
—Maxwell I. Gold
Bram Stoker Award® nominated author of Bleeding Rainbows and Other Broken Spectrums
“Captivating madness runs like a film through Liaguno’s mesmerizing collection. Every poem, another shadowy scene in the unwinding movie of this book. Each piece carried me from the first line, breathlessly to the final stanza. The delightful Afterword has a list of films, mostly horror, that inspired the dark beauty in his poetry.”
—Linda D. Addison
Multi-award winning author and SFPA Grand Master of Fantastic Poetry
