| Title | : | Cradleland of Parasites |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1946335363 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781946335364 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 103 pages |
Cradleland of Parasites Reviews
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A poetry collection inspired by the bubonic plague released during the actual Coronavirus pandemic of 2020? How prophetically macabre.If just reading this review or the subject matter of these poems have you thinking, "It's too soon!" You need to step away from this book.Tantlinger does not hold back."In the name of Pestilence, I ride, / your scared lord of contagion / bow down beneath divine damnation"Some poems are told as the voice of the plague itself. Others from the perspective of the dying host. Still others as the collectors of the dead or the doctors or childrenall of them carry the weight and severity of man vs. virus (or worm).If you are a reader easily triggered by body horror or vivid word pictures of agonizing death, putrid decay, corpses, burrowing worms, bodily fluids, symptoms of disease you might want to skip this one.But as for me and my kind, this is how we cope with the horrors we face in real life. I loved taking this journey with Sara. It was actually quite comforting knowing that disease is mankind's oldest and most formidable foe.
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Tell someone you know, maybe someone that doesn't read horror, that you are reading a book about plague poetry in the middle of the pandemic. Watch their facial expressions. Listen to their reactions. Seriously. It's a wee bit hilarious. Why do we want to be horrified? Why do we want to read on the edge. Why would I want to hear about all the death, the ugliness, the disease while I am stuck in a house with people I love, but come on now I love them, but they are supposed to go to school and work and ball practice and, and, and they are just not supposed to be here every second of every single day of every singleSIGH. Why would I want to read about all of this when the pandemic could choose to knock on my door at any second. Well, I guess it's because I am dying. I am getting a bit closer to that exit every damn day and I choose not to look away. I choose to get that ugly ol" reaper bastard in my sights right now and stare him down the whole way as he approaches.Sara Tantlinger made a name for herself with Devil's Dreamland, her poetry collection about HH Holmes. The Devil In the White City. The infamous serial killer. In her followup, she takes on another historical subject. The Black Plague. I think that I thought the Black Plague was something else, maybe leprosy?? I mean I think that I thought the symptoms were different, extreme? Boils, gangrenous rot? I don't know. Look up the symptoms. They aren't that much different than covid 19. Did you know that? I sure as shit didn't. 25 Million people died from that plague. 2.3 million have died from this one. With all our medicine, all of our technological advances, as of today 10%. 10%. So sit back and relax and read some pretty plague poetry. Be grateful that our situation isn't as bad as that one, or be pissed off that our situation is as bad as it is. Take it however you want, because pandemic or no pandemic, tomorrow or 50 years from now, we all know what's coming.I found all of the dark and beautiful imagery that I have come to expect from Tantlinger's work. This is my 4th Tantlinger read. If by chance you got this far and you still think poetry isn't for you, Sara's novella To Be Devoured is pretty damn amazing. This book was released in October 2020. So, I have to assume some of the prophetic poems that talk about history repeating were written after we were in the midst of our pandemic, if not, well, Tantlinger is a prophet. See below."Do not make the mistake of thinking history will never repeat itself,no matter how horrifying,no matter the amount of dead,and no matter the lies we tell ourselves."I also found a beautifully poetic representation of one of the darkest periods of the human experience. And maybe I found a bit of direction. A simple concept that I often forget. See below."Remember that you will die,so that you do not forget to live."I had a lot of favorites here, but I think my #1, if pressed was late in the book "Herd Immunity" is from the viewpoint of the virus and touches the idea that we, the human race, are the thing that world might need a vaccination for. Some of my other favorites were:The Justinian PlagueOriginDeath ShipsRuinous HalcyonThe Corpses BurnDivine PunishmentIn The Butchered Aftermath Wow, what a title.48 SkeletonsAn Advanced SocietySpillover
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"What comes after all of this,in the quiet of the night when starsshine again, sparkling in the sky constant reminders of life's gifts,what comes after all of this?" This was a very visceral, macabre collection of plague poetry! It's a quick read, and delightfully dark.
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Sara Tantlinger is brilliant. I said it and I will stand by it! She has a knack for creating such illustrative and beautiful poetry while centralizing/being influenced by such dark horrors. In the case of Cradleland of Parasites, that horror is THE BLACK PLAGUE. And believe me, we need some magical horror poetry about a plague right now I devoured this collection quicker than I anticipated but I could not stop myself! I know I will be re reading this collection and there are definite poems that stand out for me: "The Demon of Constantinople," "Her Face of Bones and Needles," "Second Pandemic," "Crimson Mercy," "The Corpses Burn," "The King's Ulcer," "Blackbirds, Black Death," and "Island of Ghosts." There is not a single poem in here that I did not fawn over, but those were some of my favorites. I highly recommend this collection. And if you are still on the fence about horror poetry here is your chance to start with a powerful collection! 5 stars!
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** Edited as review is now live on Kendall Reviews! **I’ve been working harder to read dark poetry. When Sara Tantlinger announced her next collection, ‘Cradleland of Parasites,’ would be inspired by the Black Death, I was very intrigued. When it was offered for review, I actually paused to decide if I wanted to read it, worried I may not be an intelligent enough reader for it, but now, after having finished it, I’m so happy I took it.What I liked: Like all of the other amazing poets I’ve read recently, Tantlinger thrives on making you feel repulsed in as few words as possible. The poems in this collection are grime covered with mold growing through the cracks. Time and time again I pictured stacks of burning bodies in the streets, while dirt covered homeless people scavenged on the dead’s belongings. These poems are powerful if not grotesquely bleak. Highlights for me were ‘Her Face of Bone Needles,’ ‘Death Ships,’ ‘Rattus Rattus,’ ‘The Corpses Burn,’ ‘Bloodletting,’ and ‘Cradleland of Parasites.’ Saying that, pretty much every single poem will kick you in the face and make you spit out blood.What I didn’t like: God, another of these. Nothing! OK! Ha! Tantlinger has created such a visual group of poems that it’s hard to find anything that put me off. Her way with words is superb.Why you should buy it: This group of poems will get your mind racing and I suspect a large number of you who read this, will do exactly what I did once done – go and Google “Black Plague” and watch in awe as her words come to life with old descriptions and illustrations. Just outstanding work and I’m jumping immediately into her novella ‘To Be Devoured.’
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"Remember that you will die,so that you do not forget to live."Sara Tantlinger is a master of poetry. Her writing is so damn captivating.Cradleland is equal parts beautiful and grotesque (which is basically my aesthetic). I learned about the Black Plague through Tantlinger's poetry than I ever learned in school (sorry to my teachers). Each poem is so well crafted. You will squirm and you will wonder what is wrong with humanity while ALSO wondering why this collection is so relevant in 2020.I had to bust out my sticky flags for this one because so many quotes spoke to me.
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Beginning millennia ago and working forward, Cradleland of Parasites paints a poetic picture of sicknesses both forgotten and infamous, a history lesson that is both warning and alluring. This is one of those horrors that's hard to look at, but you can't look away from. Read aloud, every line flows smooth off the tongue. There's a perverse joy to each poem, a sense that this should've been fun, and yet you're having the time of your life, even when the past reminds us a little too much of the present. Sara Tantlinger's poems capture a long and still going story of sickness and inhumanity. The plague was never so beautiful.
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Cradleland of Parasites shows why Tantlinger is such a remarkable writer of historical horror: grounded in deep research, she has a talent for making the dark wonder of times past feel real and omnipresent and contemporary as if mankind were fated to dark days and evil ways forever. She can take something as distant from us as a medieval plague and make it reach out to touch us today like a cold dead hand from the grave grabbing hold of your ankle, contaminating you even if you manage to break free. The treatment of disease as a kind of omnivorous god over mankind is very disturbing, and Tantlinger succeeds at generating not only physical creeps, but philosophical shivers. It isn’t often that a book cracks history open like this, reveling in the science of anguish and the unknowable needs of the parasite, and I just loved the dark places this book took me, which felt altogether other and unique. I’m very glad I got the advanced special hardcover edition, too, which includes uncanny photographs of a plague doctor at work in a beautiful but harrowing realm, matching the tone of dark elegance that we feel in the poetry perfectly. Cradleland of Parasites is a stunning achievement, pitch perfect in its black mood and dark philosophy, and I’ve never read anything like it before. In Cradleland, which was published during the Covid 19 pandemic but has nothing to do with it, the horror is epic in scope than Tantlinger’s previous (and award winning) work of historical horror poetry, The Devil’s Dreamland. That book embodied infamous serial killer HH Holmes as a kind of cultural artifact of evil, slithering beneath all the optimistic progress of the World’s Fair in 1890’s Chicago to commit heinous crimes in his murder castle. In this title, the poet reaches back centuries to explore evil in an almost timeless, omnipresent way. If Holmes were the worm that writhes beneath the rock of modernism, here Tantlinger lifts up the very bedrock of the planet to explore what writhes beneath in a frank and often objective feeling way, getting at the larger spirits at work in the universe. The language is so rich that it does than any scientific history ever could. Her poems make beautiful that which would otherwise disgust us, and she does this so artfully in Cradleland that what she describes enthralls and allows some very dark ideas to conjure beauty and wonder in the reader’s imagination.While the history Tantlinger delves into is clearly well researched and deep in this book which mostly, but not only, delves into the Black Plague of medieval times the malignancy of disease she writes about feels vast and timeless, and Tantlinger’s creepy and confrontational poetry magically brings that impossible scope to life. It is punishingly frank regarding man’s frailty as it considers the omnipotence of despair. The plague is personified often in this amazing collection of poems, and that plague is pitiless and harrowing and at times beautifully grotesque. Reading over 100 pages of poetry about disease’s constant indifference to mankind’s suffering across the centuries gets a little depressing, to be honest, but the poet’s way with words keeps you engaged and awe struck anyway, wondering about the secret realms and desires of pestilence, and enthralled by the bold perspective on life and death that she constructs as she goes.There are interesting characters encountered in this book’s pages, from plague doctors to monarchs to lab researchers to families suffering extremes, but these are not narratives of survival and the people here are subordinated to the inevitability of rot, contagion and demise. As one poem laments in its recurring line, “How much death will god allow?” The answer this book gives is hazy, but may be that disease loves us than any god. Language is the only life preserver here, actually and it’s a slippery one to hold on to, as the sadness of man’s fate threatens to pull you under on every page, even as Tantlinger’s evocative language style lifts you up and injects you with a sense of dark wonder that keeps you reading. There's a pessimism at play in her approach that is reminiscent of the work of Thomas Ligotti. Like that author’s work, Tantlinger’s book gives you the sense that we deserve our suffering, that we are fools to think otherwise, and perhaps it would have been better if we had never existed at all. Yet the book also manages to build up the reader’s respect for disease, validating our dread while celebrating it with wonder, while raising our awareness of the precariousness of life in surprising ways. Indeed, there are touches of optimism in this book, churning in a kind of Gothic beauty beneath the surface of so many burst buboes and boils, which makes this “bubonic litany” such a unique and original collection. Highly recommended. The ideas in Cradleland of Parasites will eat at you, and the book will leave you wrecked.
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I have fallen upon a few plague novels over the course of the pandemic. It's very surreal to read about plagues, pandemics, the history of harsh and fatal diseases while living through a pandemic. It definitely heightens the works that I have been reading lately!The poems in Cradleland of Parasites center around The Black Plague. Wow, these poems were dark and brutal and beautiful. Some of my favorites were Second Pandemic, Moral Decay, Death Knell, and An Advanced Society.Cradleland of Parasites was my first poetry collection by Sara Tantlinger. I read and loved her novella To Be Devoured which definitely had a poetic quality to it. I look forward to checking out from her in the future!3.5/5 starsReview copy provided by author
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This is like nothing I’ve ever read. I love it. It’s one part soothing memento mori that really encapsulates the time we are living in, and another part fucking metal slaughterhouse that makes you want to throw up those horns. You would think those two things don’t go together but Sara Tantlinger doesn’t really give them a choice. Masterful. Thanks for writing this.
