reweaving

wake up, penelope, dear child

[gothiccharmschool]

Can you share the titles of your top 20 favorites from your vampire bookcase?

Whooo, that's a tough one. After staring into the depths of the bookcase, in no particular order:

Dracula - Bram Stoker

Interview with the Vampire - Anne Rice

The Vampire Lestat - Anne Rice

Queen of the Damned - Anne Rice

The Delicate Dependency - Michael Talbot

A Dowery of Blood - S.T. Gibson

Beguiled by Night - Nicole Eigener

Dark Dance - Tanith Lee

Personal Darkness - Tanith Lee

Darkness I - Tanith Lee

Lost Souls - Poppy Z. Brite

Voice of the Blood - Jemiah Jefferson

Gothique - Kyle Marffin

Covenant with the Vampire - Jeanne Kalogridis

Those Who Hunt the Night - Barbara Hambly

Traveling with the Dead - Barbara Hambly

Vampire Kisses - Ellen Schreiber

Anno Dracula - Kim Newman

Sunshine - Robin McKinley

Dreams of Decadence - anthology

[wishbzne-deactivated20210526]

the double image, anne sexton from the complete poems written c. 1960

[andrumedus]

“I would never tie you down, not even with garlands of roses. I don’t want anything from you that doesn’t come from your own impulse, like water from the springs.”

— Dulce María Loynaz, tr. James O’Connor, Absolute Solitude: Selected Poems; “XLVI”

[gnossienne]

from A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller (1932-1953)

[lifeinpoetry]

If I invite her to give her endless well

of grief a name,

I am afraid it will be

mine.

— Blythe Baird, from "What a Body Inherits," Sweet, Young, & Worried

[metamorphesque]

― Hiromi Kawakami, The Briefcase

[lipsticklesbia]

i will never stop thinking about this poem my greek professor showed us

[savagedefectives]

kristin dombek

[weltenwellen]

Ono no Komachi & Izumi Shikibu, tr. by Jane Hirshfield & Mariko Aratani, The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan

[frankencain]

john darnielle / black sails viii / pathologic 2: the marble nest / ghost quartet, dave malloy / black sails xvii / the ostereia / black sails xxxiv / the illiad, homer / no second troy, william butler yeats / black sails xxxviii / planet of love, richard siken / catherine deneuve discussing belle du jour / hannah kent, from ‘burial rites’ / the worm king’s lullaby, richard siken / true detective 01x08 / rosencrantz and guildenstern are dead, tom stoppard / pathologic / dark (2017-2020) / julius caesar, shakespeare / twin peaks 07x07 / heroes: mortals and monsters, quests and adventures by stephen fry / sherlock 04x01 / the city, c.t. cavafy (trans. edmund keeley) / la clairvoyance, rené magritte (1936) / sir gawain and the green knight (trans. james j. wilhelm) / arrival (2016) / the castle, franz kafka / dark (2017-202) / hamlet, shakespeare / the green knight (2021) / the silmarillion, j.r.r. tolkien / hadestown, anaïs mitchell

[lifeinpoetry]

You were a person with a body, and flaws, and sometimes you were unkind,                 as was I. And worse,                     you loved me,         and had always seen these things.

— Rebecca Hazelton, from “Late Youth,” published in Queen Mob’s Tea House

[selfharminlit]

“I cut myself to open a mouth on my body. / It was an accident, but I could finally breathe.”

— Steve Healey, from “Villanelle on Blood,” Safe Houses I Have Known (via lifeinpoetry)

[draculasdaughter]

Clarice Lispector, Forgiving God

[delioncunt]

FLESH IS A CONSTANT HAUNTING Lives of Girls and Women, Alice Munro / Ourobroricisms, Alice Lesperance / Our Lady of the Flowers, Jean Genet tr. Bernard Frechtman / Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk, tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones / The Violent Bear It Away, Flannery O'Connor / Simulacra, Airea D. Matthews

[moved-to-theundergroundwoman]

You are the knife I turn inside myself; that is love.

I confuse instinct for desire — isn’t bite also touch?

because you want to die for love, you always have

Georges Bataille, Guilty / The Lovers, Akseli Gallen / Richard Siken, Wishbone / Shakespeare, Pericles / scene from Eiichi Yamamoto’s Belladonna of Sadness (1973) / Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena / Safet Zec, 1943 | Allegories of Fate / Marina Tsvetaeva, from Poem of the End: V / Carmen. Ill. Alastair. / Emily Brontë, from, “Wuthering Heights,” / Carmen. Ill. Alastair. / Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem / Richard Siken

[draculasdaughter]

Gothic’s most prevalent ingredient that sustains but also gives the genre its disturbing flavour, blood conjures up the Thing, the horror of otherness, and constitutes a schism that tears through the veil of horror’s aesthetic and rhetoric in order to get a glimpse of the world beyond, of the inhuman. Metaphors of blood are imperilled by the horror of blood, by its sheer senselessness. In this sense, blood here should not be understood as a bodily fluid and a harmonious part of organic humanity, but as an inhuman, faceless and anonymous materiality operating mechanically and beyond human control. (…) It is blood as a sign of a living death and a negative life.

— Aspasia Stephanou, Inhuman Materiality in Gothic Media, 2019.

[aconissa]

IN LOVING YOU I EAT MY HEART; IN LOVING ME YOU EAT MINE

Mary Renault, The Persian Boy Stephen Crane, ‘In the Desert’ Grace Moloney, bite the hands that feed me Yves Olade, Bloodsport Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem Edvard Munch, Two Heart (detail), 1899 Philippe de Champaigne, Saint Augustine (detail), 1650 Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy, trans. Mark Musa Red Dragon (2002), dir. Brett Ratner Margaret Atwood, ‘Two-Headed Poems’