Black Arcadia
Formally adventurous and luminous in its imagery, Kristine Ong Muslim’s Black Arcadia exists in the space between order and chaos, process and product, beauty and destruction. Pristine couplets are juxtaposed with their remnants, the vestiges of a carefully structured world. As the book unfolds, readers will find themselves inhabiting a magnificent wilderness as Muslim writes across and beyond the literary forms that we’re familiar with. She shows us that it is within these radiant apertures, these glowing liminal places, that anything is possible. This is an accomplished, thought-provoking volume from a truly gifted poet. - Kristina Marie Darling, author of Scorched Altar: Selected Poems and Stories 2007-2014
“Black Arcadia presents us with a landscape that is barren and inhospitable, but at the same time wild and lush. These beautifully dark poems move like a sidewinder across the landscape, tangle in the undergrowth, and deliver us into something feral and exhilarating.”
– Kristy Bowen, author of major characters in minor films, girl show, and salvage
About the Author
Kristine Ong Muslim is the author of eight books of fiction and poetry: Age of Blight (Unnamed Press, 2016); Butterfly Dream (Snuggly Books, 2016); Meditations of a Beast (Cornerstone Press, 2016); Lifeboat (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2015); A Roomful of Machines (ELJ Publications, 2015); Grim Series (Popcorn Press, 2012); We Bury the Landscape (Queen’s Ferry Press, 2012); and Black Arcadia (University of the Philippines Press, 2017). Her short story collection, Age of Blight, received numerous critical raves internationally plus a spot in The Best Books of 2016 by the Chicago Review of Books. Her poetry collection, Grim Series, was included in the preliminary ballot of the Horror Writers Association’s 2012 Bram Stoker Award for poetry and was twice nominated for the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Elgin Award.
Her individual stories and poems received, among others, the following distinctions: inclusion in The Wigleaf Top 50 (Very) Short Fictions 2012 (selected by Dan Chaon) and the storySouth Million Writers Award Notable Stories of 2011, plus multiple nominations for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Web (Dzanc Books), Best of the Net (Sundress Publications), and the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Dwarf Stars Award and Rhysling Award. Her short stories and poems have been widely anthologized and published in such magazines as Confrontation Magazine, Southword, The Freeman, and Weird Fiction Review.
Kristine Ong Muslim serves as poetry editor of LONTAR: The Journal of Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction, a literary journal published by Epigram Books in Singapore, and was coeditor with Nalo Hopkinson of the Lightspeed Magazine special issue, People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction!
Born in September 1980 in Kidapawan, Cotabato, she grew up and continues to live in a rural town in Maguindanao, southern Philippines.
Black Arcadia is her eighth book.