Halloween HeartsAdele Gardner

HALLOWEEN HEARTS: POETRY INSPIRED BY RAY BRADBURY AND EDGAR ALLAN POE

Adele Gardner’s Halloween Hearts is a welcome celebration of all things Halloween, whether they take place on October 31st or not. Disciples of All Hallows’ Eve, enter of your own free will . . . haunted houses, trick-or-treaters, vampires, demonic foxes, witches and their familiars, revenants both longed-for and uninvited, and the creeping mists of autumn all have their place in these pages.

Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe—icons of the American imagination, pilgrims of the nightside territories of the mind—have a special place in Gardner’s works. The poetry in this volume is inspired by much of what makes each of these authors special to so many readers: Poe’s sensitivity to loss and melancholia, and to horror and terror, and Bradbury’s enthusiastic embrace of Halloween and other dark aspects of Americana, along with his refusal to allow death to be the final word in our relationship with our loved ones. With “Eureka” “Nevermore,” “Poe’s Prophets,” and other poems, Gardner explores Poe’s hallowed place in our haunted hearts. And in the title poem, which opens the book, Gardner lovingly celebrates Ray Bradbury and his unique alchemy of nostalgia, dread, and Halloween eternal.