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mary_soon_lee's review
This chapbook has been nominated for the 2018 Elgin Award. It contains a scant ten pages of poetry, but a full one hundred poems. To me, one of the strengths of poetry is how it can condense the essential into a brief space, and Kauderer's short poems compress ideas and characters into a fraction of a page. Most of the poems are of the science fiction persuasion, but there are also examples of science-oriented mainstream poetry, such as the opening poem about the astronaut Eugene Cernan. I found the collection a pleasure: the poetry humorous, imaginative, entertaining. How could I fail to enjoy the five-word poem, "universal kink," about alien bondage? Or the poem about aliens that look like pizzas? Or the unfortunate hero jailed by aliens in "Doom"? Or how "Scents" suggests so simply, so perfectly, what it might be like to live on a spaceship?
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