This extract from Tales from Nevermore features a selection of unnerving poetry by the award-winning poet Lucius Galloway.

A Triptych from The Drowned City by Lucius Galloway

Lucius Galloway has lived almost as many lives as your average fate-foiling feline. He’s in­­­habited the mundane but ultimately unstable existence of the alley cat, toiling as a teacher of whatever sundry subjects might be on offer to pay that week’s bills. He’s been the industrious barnyard tom, a workaday wordsmith writing pedestrian ad copy.

And then there is his most recent incarnation as the beloved and pampered household purebred, a Howard Award-winning poet feted by New York City’s literary elite. But regardless of the hat our clever cat is currently wearing, Galloway has always been, as his late mother Alice once wrote in her journal—an excerpt of which is shared for this piece with Tales from Nevermore by the poet himself — “a bit fey, as much enamored of creation’s strangeness as by its beauty. Perhaps more so.”

And indeed, Galloway’s work has always been peppered with odd, even unsettling images that more mainstream poets courting publication and acclaim tend to fastidiously eschew when penning their treatises on love and nature and other equally mundane—and often frankly boring—topics. But “mundane” and “boring” are not words anyone would ever use to describe Galloway’s verses. Take, for example, his first published poem, “When Trees Pray,” which the editors of Tales from Nevermore had the honor of printing in these pages several decades ago and reprint again here now, with the poet’s permission.

Here, Galloway does indeed begin with what seems to be a tired trope of man versus nature, detailing an encounter with a sinister natural world intent on revenge for mankind’s many abuses. But the poet quickly turns reader expectations on their ear when he posits that perhaps the trees pray not to the heavens above for justice, but to more nefarious and nameless powers for the “darker end” of revenge.

Enter his much-lauded collection, The Drowned City. Coworkers from the advertising firm where Galloway lived his previous life opine that it is a metaphor for New York City and its denizens, all drowning in the emptiness of their meaningless existences. The literary critics are less sure about the work’s specificity, with many believing it could be a statement on life in any modern city, while others draw parallels to Thoreau’s Walden and its mass of men wallowing in their quiet desperation. But all those readers ignore the elements of oddity rife in every poem in Galloway’s collection that point to a different interpretation entirely. Take, for instance, the unassumingly titled, “Heart of the City”.

Galloway claims that he wrote The Drowned City over the course of three sleep-deprived days in a “paroxysm of poetry” that had been preceded by weeks of vivid dreams and night­mares. Is it too much, then, to consider that perhaps his manic muse was trying to channel some deeper message from a place too weird for the waking world to comfortably entertain?

Perhaps the best answer to that question is given by Galloway himself, in the form of the first new work the poet has published since the debut of his acclaimed collection, a piece he has tellingly titled, “Those Not Fortunate Enough to Drown”.

With all due deference to the dearly departed Mrs. Galloway, it seems clear enough to these editors that Lucius Galloway’s infatuation with mere earthly beauty has long since dulled, and his love affair with the strange has erupted forth in vibrant, disturbing bloom. And as admirers of his more boundary-pushing work, we could not be happier to see it.

Marsheila Rockwell

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