A WRETCHED LITTLE BOOK OF POEMS

This debut illustrated volume of rhyming verse explores nightmarish and morbid things.

In his collection, Isom offers 85 poems that express the darkest horrors in the rhythm and rhyme of light verse. The subjects include madness, murder, terror, nightmares, and death, and some pieces are very bleak indeed. In “Without End,” the speaker describes anguishing punishments inflicted by anonymous forces; he’s subsumed in “molten rock,” flayed, and eaten alive by rats. Worst of all, his torturers fill his heart with love only to break it. The poem’s old-fashioned iambic tetrameter quatrains rhyming aaaa seem to mock the speaker’s torment with their reassuring, familiar rhythms. In other poems, a shocking subject is made more so through humor, calling to mind Harry Graham’s cheerfully grisly Ruthless Rhymes (1898). “Timmy’s Tummy,” for example, bears a family resemblance to Graham’s “Little Willie” verses. Little Timmy eats dirt with a bug in it, which grows inside until it splits his stomach open. His concerned mother is too late to save his life but consoles her son—now “soaked in red”—that at least “that bug is dead.” Similarly, in “C’est La Vie,” the homicidal speaker gives a Gallic shrug to his victim: “I’m not sorry nor torn, / It’s just how I was born, / And my killing you’s / par for the course.” Several poems channel H.P. Lovecraft in their images of ancient, atavistic forces climbing up from the depths, as in “Other Worldly,” in which, thanks to unwise inscriptions and incantations, a portal opens that admits evil into the world. Isom’s monochrome drawings make his horrors even more vivid and sometimes add commentary. In “Smiles Everyone,” for example, the illustration makes clear that a visitor’s smile is the open-mouth grin of a head on a spike.

Light verse that celebrates the macabre with gruesome ironies.