Songs of Enough: An Inferno All My Own by Maxwell I. Gold
Hippocampus Press (September 2025)
Reviewed by Joshua Gage
Maxwell I. Gold is a Jewish-American prose poet, author, and editor, with an extensive body of work comprising over 300 poems since 2017. His writings have earned a place alongside many literary luminaries in the speculative fiction genres and his work has garnered nominations for multiple awards including the Pushcart Prize, the Eric Hoffer Awards, Rhysling Awards, and the Bram Stoker Awards. His work has appeared in numerous literary journals, magazines, and anthologies such as Weird Tales Magazine, Startling Stories, the recent Horror Writers Association anthology Other Terrors: An Inclusive Anthology, Chiral Mad 5, and many more. His newest collection is Songs of Enough: An Inferno All My Own, an epic prose poem based on his Cyber Gods mythos.
Songs of Enough: An Inferno All My Own is based on the writings of Dante Alighieri, specifically his Inferno from The Divine Comedy. As reflected in the subtitle, rather than place himself in establish religious traditions, Gold focuses on his invented “Cyber Gods” mythos, which he has explored in previous collections. He believes horror is “the dread that comes with understanding the meaningless values placed on systems we find ourselves justifying every single day without end, creating our own cyber gods and cosmic horrors out of the Starbucks mugs and corporate slogs just to conquer those very gods and monsters.” As Alighieri was writing The Divine Comedy to critique Medieval society, so too does Gold use Songs of Enough to explore mankind’s relationship with its own constructed evils.
The plot of the epic is much more introverted than Alighieri’s, too. Gold’s text focuses on personal hells and internal hells, allegorizing them into dense, abstract language. Take, for example, the opening paragraphs of “Absent Storms,” a prose piece that describes the protagonist’s descent:
Words like petit mal, epileptic, broken, unused were strange signifiers that honestly made me feel as if I was some pale, fleshy alien that never really belonged on this planet. Perhaps the same creatures I saw in my head, tempests that sabotaged my ability to think, to scream, to tell the world I just wanted everything to be all right. Still, everyone from doctors to milk-mothers to vile-fathers, even my own thoughts disregarded the storm clouds.
There were storms and violent clashes that filled my brain like titans, forever at war in my head. I built pantheons and prisons endlessly and erroneously where geometries didn’t matter nor the price of reason to hold them up. As I grew older the storms grew worse, clouds growing ever darker over a horizon that I’d never reach when all the complex- partial what-ifs laughed in my face. The rest of the world didn’t understand and saw only my blank stares and their questions unanswered decayed like I’d secretly enjoyed them squirming at all the possibilities.
There is chaos and self-hatred here, as well as an attempt to use mythic and metaphorical language to obfuscate the details, enhancing the ambiguity and self-questioning madness of the speaker.
Anyone familiar with Gold’s previous collections will know this to be his distinct style, a prose driven not by lyricism or imagery, but by a manic energy and frenzy of words. There is a deliberate excess of language and repetition, both in terms of the organizational litanies used to frame the work but also in the content of the lines. Gold’s horror is personal and introspective, and many horror readers and poetry fans will struggle to connect on their first reading. Patience and rereading will be rewarded, however, as every plummet into this nightmare hallucination that readers are willing to brave reveals new and unique layers previously undiscovered.
