Sci-Fi & Scary

This review of As the Blade Cuts is special because it was a first for me. I'd never read any horror poetry before reading this work. I didn't know people even wrote it! Reviewing it was interesting, because I had to sort out of some of my distaste. Did I not like "x" poem because of the subject matter, or because of the way it was written, or was it really just not a good poem in my opinion? It wasn't as hard for the ones that I liked, but there was still some thought behind how I rated each one individually, and then the series as a whole.

Eric Kapitan sets out to shock and disgust with some of his poems. The intention is obvious. I found a few of them just downright in bad taste. Now, he is honest about the fact that this is exploitation poetry (something I needed to remind myself of occasionally), so for what it's worth, some of the ones I found distasteful are not badly written.

There were a few poems I really enjoyed, a few that made me snicker, and a few I hated. The majority of them were run-of-the-mill (can you even say that about horror poetry?), so like most collections, I averaged out my rating. There were more good than bad in the minorities, so I'm going to give him a 4 out of 5 rating. Kapitan has talent and that really shone brightly in a few of his works. I'd like to see him challenge himself with something a little more difficult than freeverse.

Disclaimer: I received a copy from the author in exchange for an honest review.