My Cruel Invention

An outstanding collection of poetry about inventions and inventors, real and imagined, assembled by editor and poet, Bernadette Geyer, author of The Scabbard of Her Throat and a chapbook, What Remains.

“I was awed by the seemingly endless number of ways that poets approached the subject. Naturally, there are poems about real inventions—from clocks to pantyhose to chemotherapy drugs—as well as poems that conjure fantastical inventions—such as a contraption for kissing and a happy marriage machine.

While some of the poems in this anthology provide searing commentary on the dreadfulness of some of the creations birthed by inventors, other poems offer us a view into the stories behind inventions, as well as the lives of real and imagined inventors.

Whether invoking humor, irony, historic research, or imagination, the poems in this anthology converse not only with each other, but also with their readers and the world at large, in service to the continued human drive to create solutions—even to problems we didn’t know we had.”

–Bernadette Geyer

Kelly Cherry

KELLY CHERRY is the author of twenty-four books, nine chapbooks,  and two translations of classical drama. A tenth chapbook is forthcoming any day now. Former Poet Laureate of Virginia. Member, Poets Corner, Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, NYC. NEA, USIA, Rockefeller, Bradley Lifetime Award, Weinstein Award, others. Publication in prize fiction anthologies. Eudora Welty Professor Emerita of English and Evjue-Bascom Professor Emerita in the Humanities, University of Wisconsin Madison. Eminent Scholar, UAH, 2001-2005. More info and details at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Cherry.

Joel Allegretti

JOEL ALLEGRETTI is the author of five collections of poetry. His second, Father Silicon (The Poet’s Press, 2006), was selected by the Kansas City Star as one of 100 Noteworthy Books of 2006.  He is the editor of Rabbit Ears: TV Poems (NYQ Books, 2015), the first anthology of poetry about the mass medium.