Aim For the Head: An Anthology of Zombie Poetry

A surprisingly good and effective collection of poetry. We have been beaten over the head with zombie stuff in our pop culture for so long now and it's looking a bit shabby, but Aim for the Head has found a new and interesting angle. And it's not just a parody either (although a few of the poems are good only for a small burst of humour); many of the selections are just damn good poems, zombies or not. Plenty of the poems mine the tropes of zombie fiction to comment on love and loss as well as providing social commentary.

The latter, of course, is what zombies started out as under Romero and it's good to see the poets here acknowledging this root and providing more than just horror thrills and cheap laughs. It is very effective, delving show more deep into cynicism (the last poem ends with "the zombies, by this point / will simply lose their taste for us" (pg. 123)) and making some thoughtful points. But it is the human angle which most astonished me. Consider the end of this poem on page 121, which juxtaposes a bitter break-up in a relationship with being bitten by a zombie:

"I tell myself it's going to be fine,
that she hasn't infected me
with a growing darkness
that I am not simply running on muscle memory
that my heart has not become a zombie.
I tell myself it was only
a scratch."

Favourites include: 'Fifteen Ways to Stay Alive', 'Leaving Ashlee', 'Welcome Home, You Said', 'Fear and Embrace', '13 Ways of Looking at a Baby' and 'Advent'. show less