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Excited to show you the cover of my forthcoming full-length collection of dark speculative poetry, Some Disassembly Required, featuring many previously unpublished poems.



Some Disassembly Required had me at “Bah Bah Black Goat”….Providing both tongue-in-fungoid-cheek and real scares, Kopaska-Merkel’s poetry just about covers it with his use of free verse and formalist verse (Great Old One haibun, uh-huh), funny and scary verse, Sfnal and fantastical verse.

When you read some of these poems, you’ll recognize places you’ve been...even if only in your dreams and nightmares. Kinda nice to have some validation for those night gaunt sightings, eh?

Only reality is scarier than some of these poems.

--Denise Dumars, author of Paranormal Romance: Poems Romancing the Paranormal.

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David Kopaska-Merkel... uses precise language and twisted speculation to forge a...nuanced world-view….His works here, from poems about post-apocalyptic mutations to pieces dealing with shapeshifters and space travelers, are filled with creatures who are not so much extremes, or bigger than life, but are instead totally accessible because of the ordinariness of their cruelties, the normality of their mistakes and desires, and the pettiness of their wide-spread destruction. These are the small beings who do huge damage, the powerful divinities who act out of their small-mindedness, greed, and ignorance. Then, mixed in among the fantastic and the alien, almost to the point where the reader can no longer tell one type of being from another, are humans. If we created gods and demons in our own image, to be worshiped, feared and reviled, David Kopaska-Merkel's sf-nal creations have likewise used humans in the same way. This book...is a dark, gritty, almost horrifically strange one. But, with some disassembly, the reader can start to see bright patches, sympathetic and approachable. Of course, those only serve to make...the horrors more relatable. --Marcie Lynn Tentchoff, Editor, Spaceports & Spidersilk, author of Midnight Comes Early.