anOther Nemesis Blog Tour: Guest Poet Angela Yuriko Smith & 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…

Angela Yuriko Smith: This project came to me at the perfect time because I needed a language that could hold contradictions. My poems for anOther Nemesis emerged from my experiences of living inside systems that promise meaning while quietly hollowing it out, systems of belief, power, technology, and storytelling that reward obedience and punish deviation. In my mind, poetry is the only form flexible enough to interrogate those systems without replicating them. Prose wants conclusions. Poetry allows fracture, ambiguity, and refusal.

My poems were written as acts of confrontation and witnessing. I was interested in what happens when inherited myths are no longer sufficient, yet still exert power over us. Rather than discard them, I chose to inhabit them, distort them, and speak back. Gods, nemeses, prophets, and tricksters appear throughout not as abstractions, but as pressure points. This is my way of naming the forces that shape us even when we pretend they do not.

I wrote these poems to explore how identity splinters under surveillance, algorithmic thinking, and moral absolutism​, to ask what survives when language is co-opted, when meaning is automated, ​and when dissent is reframed as failure.

I think of my contribution as a record of engagement: of wrestling with systems that claim authority over truth, and insisting on speaking anyway. I chose poetry because it resists closure, because it allows multiple truths to coexist, because sometimes the most accurate response to a broken narrative is not a counter-argument, but a fracture that refuses to be healed and hidden.

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The Monkey King—Sun Wukong, mischief embodied, irrepressible rebel birthed from stone to defy gods. His voice taunted heaven and teased immortals, arrogance wrapped in humor, wisdom hidden behind mirth. He defied limits, another snatcher of forbidden fruit, he grifted peaches of immortality and rewrote destinies with defiance. His laughter shook the celestial palaces; his clever tongue twisted divine decree into chaos, leaving order trembling in his wake.

Today, the Monkey King swings through digital jungles, flipping conventions and mocking algorithms with anarchic glee. He leaps across viral trends, prank videos, and meme culture, rebellious against the gravity of expectation. Sun Wukong is the chaos in the comment section, the unpredictable tweet that shatters expectations, the influencer who refuses to follow the script. He challenges censorship, mocks digital vanity, and playfully dismantles the serious facade of modern life, reminding humanity that freedom lies in laughter and that chaos is is needed for creation.

Defy all order—

Creation is subversive.

Freedom is laughing.

Bio: Angela Yuriko Smith, former president of the HWA and publisher of Space and Time magazine, is the proud recipient of multiple awards, including two Bram Stokers. As a Publishing Coach, she helps writers search less and submit more with her weekly calendar of author opportunities at authortunities.substack.com.

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:

Meerkat Press | Bookshop.org | Amazon

GIVEAWAY: $25 Meerkat Press Giftcard

https://meerkatpress.com/?rafflepress_page=rafflepress_render&rafflepress_id=7