5 Scary Poetry Books You Should Read

Looking for some scary poetry this spooky season? Lewis Buxton, who is teaching his course The Talking Death on Saturday 31 October, talks us through his favourite scary poetry reads that are guaranteed to send shivers down your spine!

Obviously, poetry books aren’t full of jump scares and decapitations, but they can leave us with a sense of the uncanny, a deep upset, a fear that the words we just read will stay in our minds forever. Poetry, like horror, is about timing and cutting in just the right place. We might think of the Romantics and their genuinely upsetting poems like ‘Goblin Market’ or ‘Porphyria’s Lover’. We might consider that Lord Byron was the basis for the first vampire novel written in English (John Polidori’s Il Vampiro). We might even think about poems like Wilfred Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’ where an English solider escapes the Somme only to find himself thrown into hell and having to confront the enemy he killed.

But there is also a plethora of genuinely horrifying (in all the best ways) contemporary poetry books. So here are my five favourite scary poetry books and why.

1. American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin, Terrance Hayes

Terrance Hayes’ 2018 book opens with a pretty scary epigraph from the poet Wanda Coleman,

‘’bring me

to where

my blood runs”

Which one could imagine as the haunting voiceover as Jack Nicholson drives a car up to the overlook hotel. However, this book is scary more in the way that Jordan Peele’s ‘Get Out’ is scary. It is about the horrors of being a black man in post 2016 America. In fact, it speaks specifically about a ‘black male hysteria’ and if I had to have an image for that it would be Daniel Kaluuya on the front cover of Get Out poster.

However, it’s also got some gore in it. The whole book is made up of ‘American Sonnets’ which Hayes describes as ‘part meat grinder, part panic closet’ which feels a lot like the horror films like Saw and Hostel I grew up pretending I had already seen so we wouldn’t watch them at sleepovers.

2. Waiting for Bluebeard, Helen Ivory

I remember being a precocious undergraduate and asking my lecturer why there was no poetry on our Gothic module. When she said she hadn’t really considered contemporary poetry to be ‘gothic’ I slammed down Helen Ivory’s Waiting for Bluebeard and she was very impressed. Or she would have been if that had really happened.

This book is a combination of Angela Carter and old school Hammer horror. It takes a fairly tale structure and motif to talk about domestic violence, entrapment and control, with haunting and terrifying moments of moons and houses coming to life. Ivory is a visual artists as well and her jars full of women’s photographs and manikin hands that creates the cover image makes for one of the most disturbing cover images I’ve ever seen.

3. Relinquaria, R.A Villanueva

If a book has a skull on the cover, let’s safely say it is a bit of a scary book.

R.A Villanueva brings us a collection that is deeply involved in death, how it peaks around the corners of many parts of out life. He talks about the deepest trenches of the ocean and the brutal violence of the Iliad, but , the scariest part of this book is the story behind one of the poems. It’s a poem called ‘In Memory of Xiong Huang’ and the epitaph simply reads ‘who disappeared from Shanghai and whose body, his brother believes, is not on display in New York City in a exhibition of plastinated cadavers.’

4. Witch, Rebecca Tamas

We’ve seen witches – good and bad – across the cinematic and literary spectrum, but Rebecca Tamas in this book does a great job of making not the witch, but those pointing the finger and calling her one, scary. I’m still sort of disturbed by her ‘Spell for Online Porn’ and I think quite a lot about a line from another poem which is just BLOOD BLOOD BLOOD all in capitals. Weird what punctuation can do to make you feel genuinely disturbed.

5. Grief is the Thing with Feathers, Max Porter

I’ll go to my grave (and then rise again) to argue that Grief is the Thing with Feathers can count as a poetry book. Perhaps it’s the shapeshifting between forms, that means Max Porter’s debut can be a poetry book in the moonlight but a novel when the sun hits it, that makes this a scary book? More likely it is the ever shifting, gory, body horror of the character ‘Crow’ who comes to babysit a grieving husband and his two sons. His voice is a Frankensteinian creation, cobbled together from folklore, Ted Hughes, and baby-sitting clichés:

‘intoxicating hum of innocent children, link, flack, gack-pack-nack, the whole place was heavy mourning, every surface dead Mum’.

If you would like to explore horror, zombies and deadness in poetry this Halloween, Lewis is teaching his brand new course The Walking Dead on Saturday 31 October. Find out more and book your place here.

Lewis Buxton is a writer and theatre maker. His work focuses on gender, pop culture, and sport and has appeared in Poetry Review, The Rialto and The Independent. His first collection Boy in Various Poses was published by Nine Arches Press followed by Mate Arias from The Emma Press. He lives in Norfolk.