Showing results by author "Stephanie M. Wytovich" in All Categories

A sorcerer on a cliff cuts into his own hand, summoning members of the ancient cult that destroyed his family. A maid hunts her former employer with a sword, attempting to win a revenge that could save us all. A doomed man rides a train to his dead father's home to unravel a terrible secret....

Inspired by Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, these poems are meditations on female rage, postpartum depression, compulsion, and intrusive thoughts. They pull from periods of sleep deprivation, soul exhaustion, and nightmarish delusions, and each is left untitled, a nod to the stream-of-conscious mind of a new mother.

The Apocalyptic Mannequin by Stephanie M. Wytovich is a collection that strips away civilization and throws listeners into the lives of its survivors. The poems inside are undelivered letters, tear-soaked whispers, and unanswered prayers. They are every worry you've had when your electricity went out and every pit that grew in your stomach, while watching the news at night. They are tragedy and trauma, but they are also grief and fear, fear of who - or what - lives inside us, once everything is taken away.

Roll the windows down, wipe the blood off your cheek, and turn the music up. Sheet Music to My Acoustic Nightmare by Stephanie M. Wytovich is a collection spattered with dirt and blood, sage and corpses. The poems inside are confessionals and dirges - their stories the careful banter of ghosts and sinners over tequila at the bar. This book holds the lyrics to the beautiful grotesque that Wytovich is known for, but here she crafts with a raw honesty that we haven’t seen from her before.

Asylums once used to confine those deemed mentally unfit linger, forgotten behind trees or urban development, beautiful yet desolate in their decay. Within them festers something far more unnerving than unlit corners or unexplained noises: the case files left to molder out of sight, out of conscience. Stephanie M. Wytovich forces your hands upon these crumbling, warped binders and exposes your mind to every taboo misfortune experienced by the outcast, exiled, misbegotten monsters and victims who have walked among us.

Love is an exorcism of angels... Heaven and Hell are not places, nor times, but rather shared experiences. It's a love whether dark or light, a passion whether of pleasure or pain, and there's a beauty to the ugliness, a smile hidden amongst the tears. Heaven is often defined as paradise; Hell as damnation. The two, while opposites, more often than not, end up being one and the same, especially when it comes to falling in love.

The tradition of Victorian mourning jewelry began with Queen Victoria after the death of her husband, Prince Albert. Without photography, mementos of personal remembrance were used to honor the dead so that their loved ones could commemorate their memory and keep their spirits close. Ashes were placed within rings, and necklaces were made out of hair, and the concept of death photography, small portraits of the deceased, were often encased behind glass. Wytovich's poetry explores the horror that breeds inside of the lockets, the quiet terror that hides in the center of the rings.

Wytovich plays madam in a collection of erotic horror that challenges the philosophical connection between death and orgasm. There's a striptease that happens in Brothel that is neither fact nor fiction, fantasy nor memory. It is a dance of eroticism, of death and decay. The human body becomes a service station for pain, for pleasure, for the lonely, the confused. Sexuality is hung on the door, and the act of love is far from anything that's decent. Her women spread their legs to violence then smoke a cigarette and get on all fours.