anOther Nemesis Blog Tour: Guest Poet Eugen Bacon & Meerkat Gift card Giveaway!

Poetry by Ai Jiang, Angela Yuriko Smith, Eugen Bacon & Maxwell I. Gold from Meerkat Press

What another Nemesis means to me…

Eugen Bacon: I woke today thinking about Shingai Njeri Kagunda’s words in her chapter “Black-Futurisms Vs. Systems of Domination” in the award-winning book Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction (2024). Kagunda wrote:The call here is not to just get a seat at the table, but to acknowledge that everything that was used to build the table was based on oppression, domination, and exploitation. And the only honest way to move towards Black futures is to burn down the table, scatter its ashes, and build something else. (pp.86) These words talk to me loudly when I contemplate what it is about anOther Nemesis that stood out so powerfully to me when Maxwell I. Gold reached out in March 2024, having sourced my email from a poetry showcase, to invite me to a collaborative poetry book. Initially titled Nemesis: The Poetry of Inescapable Linguistics, I looked at the proposed themes of Colonizers, Primal Sources, Nameless Others and Crooked Ontologies, and they called out all too loudly to me.

It was an opportunity I could not pass, and I realized I’d been harboring an innate outrage in me that reviewer Cheryl S. Ntumy aptly captures when she says: “Bacon’s speculative beasts born of righteous rage, come to bring a reckoning.” I wanted to write something unapologetic. Something that claimed and held its own space. I was burning down the fucken table, scattering its ashes, and now to build something else.

Calibration by Eugen Bacon

worlding the merpeople insists on fundamental descaling and tail amputation without anesthetics to ascertain if the language of crying harbors an ideology of resistance

because the truth of a creature manifests itself

when its discomfort threshold

is breached.

RELEASE DATE: February 17, 2026

GENRE: Dark Speculative Poetry

BOOK PAGE: https://meerkatpress.com/books/another-nemesis/

SUMMARY:

This dark and thought-provoking poetry collection is co-authored by four multi-award-winning authors and poets, Ai Jiang, Angela Yuriko Smith, Eugen Bacon and Maxwell I. Gold.

anOther Nemesis unravels sinister speculative poems themed The Colonizers, Primal Sources, Nameless Others and Crooked Ontologies. It reconnoitres words as weapons, reshaping to the unworldly, casting transfigurations of that which was never meant to be changed, and featuring poignant behind-the-poems by each poet.

The extraordinary assemblage interrogates the ways cultures, language, information, and the lack thereof are used as means of control; how voices will always rise against systems that rewrite identity, suppress truth, and silence dissent; the distinctions of purity and diffusion and the infinite number of fates upon which our existence is simultaneously contingent; how Ubiquitous indifference can sometimes be the cruelest villain of them all... and more!

BUY LINKS:

GIVEAWAY: $25 Meerkat Press Giftcard

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