NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

An independent small press poetry review

NHI independent review
Scifaikuest
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ISSN 1558-9730
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This page last updated: 14th December 2007. 		Scifaikuest #15

A scifaiku is a science fiction haiku, and there are plenty of good ones in this issue. Tom Gulusha amuses with:

	clinking sounds
	in dark room — robots
	discover kissing
and irving chills with
	he aims the blaster
	thinks of the shape of her mouth
	another android fries
Deborah P Kolodji is granted a FEATURED SCIFAIJIN section to herself, collapsing whole novels into a series of instamatic poetic snapshots. From the fall section of a four-part seasonal series of haiku comes this little gem of an entire backstory in just three short lines:
	early snow
	the orbit shift
	after impact
and the solo rengay, FIRST CONTACT POST-MORTEM is a space-opera trilogy barely longer than a sonnet:
	a radio hisses static
	when stations are bombed
This issue also includes haibun, which range from a few lines to couple of pages in length.

Science fiction poetry gets to the places other poems cannot reach — the poets' imaginations are running at full throttle, and the element of surprise (quite normal for haiku) is elevated to an artform in itself. In a genre which so often runs to longwindedness, it's refreshing to find such elegant concision.

reviewer: John Francis Haines.