Is there a gamer in your life who could use some poetry in theirs? I’m really excited about the possibility of bringing poetry to new audiences, and my hope is that my book Extra Lives in Verse can, in some small way, help widen the audience. Extra Lives in Verse comes out on November 13th.
In Jon Stone’s book Dual Wield: The Interplay of Poetry and Video Games, he decries how “In the popular imagination, poetry and video games lie at opposite ends of a scale that runs from the aloof to the frivolous, from high art to low. Poetry is regarded as serious, cerebral, cryptic and hermitic, video games as flashy, trivial, and senseless amusements.” He frames these assumptions as barriers to overcome, and I heartily agree.
I wrote the earliest poems for Extra Lives in Verse during COVID, when it was hard to write my usual stories and poetry. I needed something new and distracting to keep up my creativity. Something comforting. Something unexpected. I saw a submissions call for poems about video games, and I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought to put those two of my obsessions together before! What followed were years of mining my memories as a gamer girl, and of filtering my newer experiences with games through my lens as a poet.
As the manuscript took shape over the past 6 years, I wasn’t sure if it would ever find a home. It’s such a strange combination, isn’t it, poetry and video games? Well, anyone who’s read my work knows I like strange.
Then I learned about Manawaker Studio. They immediately became my dream publisher for this project. They’d put out lots of wonderful anthologies of speculative fiction and poetry—including not one but TWO anthologies of gamer poetry! But they hadn’t yet taken on a single-author book. They decided to take a chance on mine. They’ve been amazing to work with.
So if you know a gamer who might be excited to see their interests reflected in this unconventional way, please keep Extra Lives in Verse in mind.
