TOD 017 Christina Sng: All the Ends of the World

In this podcast Scott Nicolay interviews poet Christina Sng, author of Astropoetry and A Collection of Nightmares. Also Gabino Iglesias (LitReactor, Zero Saints) reviews Christina Sng’s A Collection of Nightmares and Jeremy Roberts Johnson’s In the River.

Show Notes

Poet Christina Sng joins Scott from Singapore to talk about her recent collections Astropoetry (Alban Lake Publishing) and A Collection of Nightmares (Raw Dog Screaming Press), both released in 2017, including challenges of writing poetry with small children, short vs. long form, taking inspiration from planets and moons, meshing all her dreams and nightmares before and after of who she is as a poet, post-apocalyptic poems, her fascination with death and the undead, and the complex narrative of assembling a poetry collection. She reads from A Collection of Nightmares: the darkly, beautiful ‘They Do Not Sleep’, an old favorite among her poems; ‘Crawlspace’, first published in Mike Allen’s Mythic Delirium Magazine; and ‘That Evening’, which she describes as Goth-y. The interview recommences with the risks and rewards of irregular rhyme, enjoying the challenges among different verse forms, her lineage as a poet, David C. Kopaska-Merkel and her first sale to Dreams & Nightmares, poetry as learning process, the growth of speculative fiction poetry, and how much has changed in past 10 years. She then reads from Astropoetry, ‘Mercury’, ‘Go Visit Io’, and ‘100 Days in the International Space Station’. Back to the interview, Christina discusses weird darkness versus sense of wonder in her work, why she loves the philosophy of science and logic and the Oxford Comma, and reads one more piece of Astropoetry, ‘An Assortment of Sky Things’. The discussion concludes with female empowerment in her poetry, long poetry and flash fiction, a reading of ‘Succubus’ and its therapeutic back story, her plans for what’s next including flash fiction, a novel, a horror haiku collection, another space poem collection, and more, as well as her recommended poets including Marge Simon, Linda Addison, Susan Burch, and Roberta Beary, and a final reading: ‘D-Day’.