Barfodder: Poetry Written in Dark Bars and Questionable Cafes - Softcover

Rain Graves is a Bram Stoker Award winning poet and writer (2002), currently living in San Francisco with one large black cat, and one small white cat. She has been published in the horror fiction and poetry genre since 1997, in various magazines, books, and webzines

Bukowski meets Lovecraft in this collection of more than 100 short poems from Stoker-winner Graves (Blood of a Black Bird). She explores a diversity of themes, including love, the search for self and the ubiquity of death in all its forms, from a scorned woman contemplating murder to a flying dinosaur devouring all in its path. Grave's cynical wit and macabre imagination are showcased in Ladies of the Night, where female barflies are likened to melancholy vampires; the brilliantly allegorical Unwanted Yellow Flowers, where lawn mowers have metallic teeth and dandelions lay in wait/for the kiss of death ; and Slick Eddie Dog One-Fifty-One, where a killer describes his victims as matchbooks full of dormant fire. Though there's no real narrative thread of progression to the hodgepodge of dark imagery, horror aficionados will enjoy the wry, nihilistic verse. --Publishers Weekly

Rain Graves' poetry is, by turns, surreal and very real, grand and romantic as the tango and nasty even downright gross as bugs crawling through your bed at night, burrowing through your sleeping bones. She can be funny and spooky and angry and tender and sometimes truly haunting, essaying life's tragedies and joys and triumphs with equal vigor. She's erotic and she's wicked. --Jack Ketchum

Rain Graves writes really nasty poetry. She is a mistress of creating images that stick, the kind that you cannot get out of your mind not even using steel wool and a small, extremely sharp knife. --Neil Gaiman