The Power of Poetry
By Amy Grech
Sometimes, my muse provides ideas in the form of a clever rhyme… that’s when I know it’s poetry time! I’ve been writing poetry off and on since 2011. When Alien Buddha Press opened for submissions in 2023, I decided to see if I had amassed enough poems for a chapbook. Indeed I did, and A Shadow of Your Former Self was born, on my birthday, August 20, 2023.
Pandemic poetry mixed with Horror echoes the terror and rage we all once felt; A Shadow of Your Former Self is a hybrid collection of poems and stories harkening to a dark time and creating fictional new ones. I wrote the bulk of the poems in second person as a way of distancing myself from the suburbs and the deafening silence while waylaid there during the pandemic. Like millions of others, I lost my job in March of 2020. That’s when my brother moved me out of my Brooklyn apartment, back to our childhood home on Long Island. I lived in Brooklyn for over 25 years, so there was a lot of culture shock, not to mention heartbreak. I don’t drive, so I quickly became “the other” on the block, amongst neighbors unaware of my plight. My friends lived in the city, so I grappled with overwhelming isolation. I often took the train back to visit friends for the day, but the commute quickly became expensive and exhausting.
Poetry served as my salvation, a way to heal my fractured psyche. Words flowed fast and furious—jotted down longhand in a tattered notebook before I entered the second draft on my laptop; the cathartic process enabled me to cope with the crippling uncertainty I often felt. I worried I would never move back to the city. I didn’t find an apartment in Brooklyn, but in April, 2022, I lucked out with an oversized studio in Forest Hills, Queens, a short subway ride to the city. Now, I see my friends often, and all is right in the world.
AUTHOR BIO
Amy Grech has sold over 100 stories to various anthologies and magazines including: 10 by 10 Flash Fiction Stories, Apex Magazine, Even in the Grave, Microverses, Punk Noir Magazine, Roi Fainéant Press, Tales from the Canyons of the Damned, Yellow Mama, and many others. Alien Buddha Press published her poetry chapbook, A Shadow of Your Former Self.
She is an Active Member of the Horror Writers Association and the International Thriller Writers who lives in Forest Hills, Queens.
You can connect with her on Bluesky:
https://bsky.app/profile/amygrech.bsky.social, Medium: https://medium.com/@crimsonscreams,
X: https://twitter.com/amy_grech, or visit her website: https://www.crimsonscreams.com.
Angry Gable Press 