Thought Against Tomorrow: New and Collected Poems

I pulled out and shaped like this

It is still bleeding, but only a little

It won't mess your hands much,

And you can wash them after.

For years Hugo and Nebula award winning writer Jo Walton has been writing poems and posting them online, first on usenet, then on livejournal, more recently on Patreon. Some have been collected in chapbooks and in Starlings, but most of them have just stayed online. Here at last is a comprehensive collection of her poems from 1996-2020 with table of contents and an index of first lines, and arranged in thematic categories, Love Pain and Death, New Myths For Old Gold, Red As Blood, By Their Spaceships Ye Shall Know Them, Shakespeare, The News, The Turning Year, and Whimsy. Some of the poems are fantastical, others are about everyday life, or politics. If there's one thing that links Walton's very different work it's the quality of "where did that come from?" Here we have a poem about lions becoming extinct after being persecuted by martyrs, one about Henry V's conquest of Constantinople, alongside one about a skydiver friend who died and fell up into the sky. These poems, written over decades, are quirky, unpredictable, and have excellent scansion.