Mercurius Magazine
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The MERCURIUS Show: Interactive Livestream Event
The September 20, 2025 episode of Lit Balm: An Interactive Livestream Reading Series will be the MERCURIUS show, and feature Vik Shirley, Thomas Helm, Marcus Silcock, and Ben Niespodziany! As always, we’ll begin with poems from our hosts and end with an open mic. It’s gonna be a doozy! I am going to read a… Read more
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New 21st Century Anthology of Surreal-Absurd Poetry Released
We’re excited to share the release of the first anthology from Mercurius Magazine — a groundbreaking collection of contemporary surrealist and absurdist poetry. Edited by Marcus Silcock, Vik Shirley, Thoman Helm, and Benjamin Niespodziany, this volume brings together over 80 poets whose work challenges conventional form and embraces the strange, the uncanny, and the beautifully unclassifiable. Spanning 370 pages, the anthology offers… Read more
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The Visual Sonnets of Laura Wetherington
“Thylias Moss once said to me that the knots and turns in a tree’s branches are all evidence of failures, but in the context of a complex system, they make the tree beautiful and unique. I turned to the trees, first with tree rubbings, and then with collage. I am making new sonnets, visual ones… Read more
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Barton Smock
Terrific surreal-absurd sampler from Barton Smock at Mercurius Magazine. It’s kinda partly neo creationism with Adam and Eve. “Surrealism steals the past from nostalgia. It’s not an escape. It’s a sustainable staying. A personal ruin that ruins nothing. My love for transformation is unchanged. Angels hate art.” – Barton Smock Check Barton Smock’s sampler out… Read more
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Ian McMillan Surreal-Absurd
On the way home my mates and I were spectacularly bored on the rattling bus and I said, apropos of nothing, that when I got home I was going wash my hands in a bowl made from old leather cucumbers when I got home. That collision of leather and cucumbers got a laugh and a… Read more
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Surreal-Absurd Sampler Aaron Kent
This bi-weekly feature surreal-absurd at Mercurius is chalk-full of freshness. The latest, the poetry of Aaron Kent, features the belly of a dinosaur, avatar’s eating themselves from the inside, making the milk rounds, oceans of flame and the universe as a diamond. It is activism. The serious colliding with the absurd. Check out the poems… Read more
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Jeff Hilson Surreal-Absurd
“Is there anything more beautifully absurd than Kenneth Koch’s tiny play about the island of Madagascar breaking away from the African continent, or Hannah Weiner’s code of signals Romeo and Juliet? I’m currently writing a series of very short plays about fungi, as well as making a record of all the dreams I’ve been having… Read more
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Kristin Bock Surreal-Absurd
Terrific end of the year 2023 sampler over at Mercurius. Some surreal-absurd poems of Kristin Bock. Glass Bikini and Cloisters. Definetely want to hold and read those ones. Read the sampler and mini essay of Kristen Bock over here. Read more
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William Erikson Surreal-Absurd
Terrific surreal-absurd feature at Mercurius this week. It’s William Erikson. There are many doozies. Here is part of one called BBC: “A young man lifts his hands to the sun and the sun becomes / honey. He opens his mouth to the moon and the moon becomes / breath mints.” Read more of William Erikson’s… Read more
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Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi
“Living is a language of hunger I want to make love to a man No not a man exactly but I want to Make love to something extremely hairy . . .” This week’s surreal absurd sample of Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi will tingle yr pineal. Head on over here to read more: tingletingle Read more
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Sin Yong-Mok Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“Ghosts appear in many plays. A long time ago the actor who played the Ghost had to get rid of his body. Only his voice was left. It must have been before someone wearing a white sheet took on the role of the Ghost.“ This week’s surreal-absurd sampler is Sin Yong-Mok. Translated from the Korean… Read more
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Ailbhe Darcy Surreal-Absurd Sampler
To write poetry at all might be to see what in the world is beautiful because it is absurd. -Ailbhe Darcy Read more
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Lee Sumyeong Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“In his 1924 Surrealist Manifesto, Andre Breton wrote that “Swift is Surrealist in malice, / Sade is Surrealist in sadism. / Chateaubriand is Surrealist in exoticism.” Lee Sumyeong might be described as being surrealist in the quotidian.” Read more
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Lesle Lewis Surreal-Absurd
I think of it as a spectrum and not a binary division of real from surreal or sense from nonsense. I think of it as inclusive, the surreal being part of the real, the real as part of the surreal, the sensical in nonsense and the nonsense in sense, a new sense. Read more
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Joyelle McSweeney Surreal-Absurd Sampler
The tools we need for a reversal of fortunes are right in front of us, easily to hand. We must simply take up the weapons that harm us and REVERSE them. Read more
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BETSEY TROTWOOD
Great night at The Betsey Trotwood in London for Mercurius Magazine’s Surreal-Absurd feature. Our first live event with readings by Vik Shirley, Marcus Silcock, Jane Yeh, and Mark Waldron. Here is a phone recording of my reading with poems from my books The Green Monk & Rides & Tangling llamas on the Tresses of the… Read more
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Sawako Nakayasu Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“At some point, as if there was some kind of tipping point, there seemed to be enough surreal aspects to the supposedly real world, which made it simply a more honest way to try to reckon with said world.” – Sawako Nakayasu Read more
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Evan Nicholls Surreal-Absurd Sampler
We have many fab surreal-absurd samplers over at Mercurius magazine. Evan Nicholls Surreal-Absurd Sampler is stellar. Love those surreal-absurd little bundles. Tiny crossbows. Those little songs of the tooth. Ear as nibbled coin. Read more
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Jeremy Over
I’m not sure why I persist in associating absurdity with happiness when the concept is rooted in death and when a human induced sixth mass extinction has recently upped the absurdity stakes significantly. But here we are. ‘Now for lunch’ as Ron Padgett writes at the end of his poem ‘The Death Deal’.” Read more
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Mark Waldron Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“The dirty old unconscious is always toiling away down there, cooking up something peculiar and true; day in, day out; night in, night out; which might be turned into a poem.”—Mark Waldron 2022 kicks off with Mark Waldron. A surreal-absurd sampler. You can read them here at Mercurius. Read more
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Judson Hamilton
“These poems are from a manuscript I’m working on called The Vogue for Flatness, so we’re still learning about one another. Poems for me are a way to filter the world, to make sense of it, to live in it. Perhaps it’s having been raised in suburbia or a childhood steeped in comics and cable… Read more
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Patricia Farrell
“touching my dancing hands like a robot back walking that I don’t feel too sorry for but I know the cold that’s hitting me was hitting my face to the claws ” Read more
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Glen Armstrong
“I’ve been writing requiems for people I admire lately, some of them fictional, some of them still alive. These folks may have ended up on gum wrappers or Mr. Cobain’s t-shirt or Mr. Zapruder’s movie. They usually share a unique talent that still can’t compensate for a unique and profound sadness. These are a few… Read more
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Mark Russell
“They mine the ways in which we deceive and are deceived; how our pursuit of meaning and intimacy so persistently misfires; how unremitting is the absurdity, and yet how heartily we laugh into it.” Read more
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Brian Clifton
“There was a game I used to play as a child. My friends and I would turn off the lights of a room and stare at each other’s faces. Because we could only see vague outlines, our imaginations would fill in the details, would distort the faces we knew until they were strange and stranger.”… Read more
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Lorelei Bacht
“I grew up on French surrealisme (my mother would read us Paul Eluard’s poetry at bedtime) and I visit this open-ended poetic space whenever I am struggling to make sense of things and/or to write anything sensical. Sometimes, I manage to catch a few sublime fish. Other times, I can only perceive a faint glimmer. ”… Read more
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David Greenslade
“During lockdown I explored the idea of immobility — especially the sessile animal known as the sponge. I began to think of myself as a sessile being.” Read more
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Jeff Alessandrelli
“I attempted to investigate what doesn’t fit and why that unfitting is often more important than that that fits. The songs on the record that I like best are the ones that momentarily skip before righting themselves. But you remember the skip later.” — Jeff Alessandrelli Read more
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Hugh Behm-Steinberg
“One of the things that most frustrated me about living in B_________ was its absence of mammals. Except for people, their cats and dogs, and the bats that flitted around at sunset, I never saw a single squirrel, mouse, or wolf, anywhere. So I ordered five pairs of red breeding squirrels on Amazon using my… Read more
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Jennifer L Knox
“I like to surprise my reader and myself as I write. To do that, I have to set up a familiar situation on the page in which expectations are clear, then subvert those expectations. To zag instead of zig. Sometimes it’s funny. Sometimes it’s weird and creepy and feels like a ghost is typing through… Read more
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Vik Shirley
Enjoying curating the surreal-absurd feature in Mercurius magazine. So much interesting work out there. Here is a selection of poems from Vik Shirley. From her chapbook Corpses and her collection, The Continued Closure of the Blue Door. The surreal is alive and well! Check em out over here Read more
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Mercurius Surreal-Absurd Feature
I am just getting started with the surreal-absurd feature for Mercurius Mag. In the coming weeks, we have some stellar poems from Vik Shirley and Chrissy Williams. To join the conversation, I have featured a few of my own surreal-absurd tales and prose poems. Click HERE to read the selection of surreal absurd tales from… Read more
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Mercurius Magazine
I am super happy to have an excerpt from my novel Never Mind the Beasts in Mercurius Magazine (out of Barcelona and the world). The excerpt is from the immigration to Vegas section. Circus Circus. Meat loaf and bishops. Irish ninjas. Lotsa hunks. You can read it over here. Read more
Never Mind the Beasts 