Suburban Gothic, by Amber Ridenour Walker

Poetry, chapbook, 32 pages, from Bottlecap Features. Suburban Gothic is a collection of poems that explores themes of modern-day ennui, pop culture, isolation, and darkness, within the context of ghosts, witches, myths, and legends. Ranging from musings on Celine Dion music videos to cut-ups of phrases from ghost-hunting shows to tarot cards, these poems expose the frighteningly deep shadows behind what appears to be ordinary life. Written over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic and the author’s divorce, these poems are about the stories we tell ourselves about what lurks just below the surface of the everyday. As a symbol represents itself and something else, too, here a faithless lover is revealed as Bluebeard, punk rock teenagers become ghosts, paranormal investigators search for love, and the god Pan lurks in the aisles of a 7-11. Art reveals the mythic component of our lives; the secrets we keep from ourselves. The genius of the gothic genre is that the monster was always just ourselves and everyone we know. Amber Ridenour Walker is the author of Surfacing: Poems (Free Lines Press), I Thought This Would Be Cooler (Bottlecap Press), and a handful of other limited-edition chapbooks. Her poems and short stories have appeared in such places as 20 Minutes in Portland: A Special Edition of The Portland Review, 580 Split, Tiny Spoon, LEON Literary Review, Bombay Gin, and the Sonic Salon podcast. Amber holds an MFA from The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and she currently serves as English Adjunct Faculty at Pikes Peak State College. She was born in a small agricultural town in central Washington State and escaped as soon as she was able to.