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Direct link: March Poetry (mp3)

In this episode of the Strange Horizons podcast, editor Anaea Lay presents poetry from the March issues of Strange Horizons.

  • A Glance Across the Ballroom, by Ada Hoffmann. You can read the full text of the poem, and more about Ada, here.
  • Bang, by Stefon Mears. You can read the full text of the poem, and more about Stefon, here.
  • Schrödinger's Tree, by Madeline Sebastian Burtenshaw. You can read the full text of the poem, and more about Madeline, here.
  • Origin, by Heather Sommer. You can read the full text of the poem, and more about Heather, here.



Ada Hoffmann is the author of The Outside and Monsters in My Mind. Her writing has appeared in Strange Horizons, Asimov's, and Uncanny. She is a computer scientist, a classically trained soprano, and an autistic self-advocate. You can find her online at http://ada-hoffmann.com/ or on Twitter at @xasymptote.
Anaea Lay lives in Chicago, Illinois where she writes, cooks, plays board games, reads too much, and questions the benevolence of the universe. Her work has appeared in many places including Apex, Penumbra, Lightspeed, Daily Science Fiction, and Nightmare. She lives online at anaealay.com.
Heather Sommer is an MFA candidate at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her words have appeared in Cider Press Review, decomP magazinE, Paperdarts, and Bank-Heavy Press' anthology Avoid Ninja Stars. She is not worried about the impending zombie apocalypse because she grew up in the Midwest.
Madeline Sebastian Burtenshaw is relatively new to poetry. Her first public performance was her poem "Dare to Reach," commissioned for the Greenbelt 2012 Goth Eucharist. Her writing interests encompass speculative fiction, relationships and gender, faith and doubt, gothic subculture, and her six mad cats. Her website is madelineseb.wordpress.com.
Look for the Conjure Man’s first novel The Patron Saint of Necromancers. Stefon Mears also has eight more novels to his credit, along with an MFA in Creative Writing and a BA in Religious Studies. Look for him online at www.stefonmears.com, @stefonmears on Twitter and Google+. Monthly newsletter at stefonmears.com/join.
Current Issue
16 Mar 2026

The garden is the resting place of your vulnerabilities; there’s a reason you’ve left them here instead of carrying them with you. Typically you enter hardened and hurried, beelining straight for the correct plot and quickly releasing whatever is clutched in your hand without a second thought—today, an attempted weaving of leather and lace, strength and suppleness that your body cannot figure out how to wear, nor your words to narrate.
If you say there are rats, I will believe you, though I don’t hear or see them.
A ruffling of branches as they resettle for the night. We dare not ask why they are here.
Spec Fic and the Politics of Identity 
As part of a collective of African writers who have created an Afrocentric Sauútiverse of five planets, two suns and a spirit moon, a world of science and fantasy, where there is no written language, we play with technology and sound magic to scrutinise the world as we know it, and use speculative fiction as a response to our world. 
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