 | Nightmare Jones: Poems Author: Bramer, Shannon | |
| Price: $11.24 | ||
Summary:
Shannon’s twenty-eight poems in Nightmare Jones send delightful shivers down the spine. Written in a variety of styles and forms, they encompass magic realism and influences from fairy tales, folklore and ghost stories, alongside more contemporary explorations of unusual creatures, misunderstood monsters and commonplace human fears (both ridiculous and sublime!).
Reviews:
Booklist (+) (09/01/25)
Full Text Reviews:
Booklist - 09/01/2025 *Starred Review* “Nightmare Jones comes to town / with a bit of blood on his shoe.” This line opens a collection of original poems in mostly free verse, destined to creep out the most jaded of middle- and even high-schoolers. Smeary illustrations, often recalling Stephen Gammell at his most macabre, echo the gleeful darkness of, for example, “Chatterbox” (“He had a drawer full of teeth”) and a “Ghost in the Mirror” with “tadpole eyes and the face / of an old tree.” Elsewhere, Bramer offers, as she puts it, “meddlesome ghosts and haunted shoes, hybrid creatures and spiders in every moonlit corner.” She is indeed particularly fond of spiders, which in various entries occupy her Aunt Irene’s antique dollhouse, weave a quilt-size web above her bed, and teem on a cracked wall: “it’s my wall / my wall is moving // i can tickle them / spider legs / they don’t laugh.” She has a talent for discomfiting names so that, though Pencilmen, Eyeballboys, and Earfish only get passing mentions for effect, other “monsters” like Badlonely and Hummingbird Man earn full, eerie entries of their own. Along with keeping individual readers up at night, will her poems have their proper effect in a dimly lit group setting? Oh, yes. “I’m tender and warm as a just gone bye-bye body,” she writes. “And the shimmering children here / just visiting / think I’m cool.” - Copyright 2025 Booklist.
