Everything Endless by Linda D. Addison and Jamal Hodge
Raw Dog Screaming Press (April 2025)
Reviewed by Joshua Gage
Linda D. Addison (born September 8, 1952) is an American poet and writer of horror, fantasy, and science fiction. Addison is the first African-American winner of the Bram Stoker Award, which she won five times. The first two awards were for her poetry collections Consumed, Reduced to Beautiful Grey Ashes (2001) and Being Full of Light, Insubstantial (2007). Her poetry and fiction collection How To Recognize A Demon Has Become Your Friend won the 2011 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Poetry Collection. She received a fourth HWA Bram Stoker for the collection The Four Elements, written with Marge Simon, Rain Graves, and Charlee Jacob. Her fifth HWA Bram Stoker was for the collection The Place of Broken Things, written with Alessandro Manzetti. Addison is a founding member of the CITH (Circles in the Hair) writing group.
Jamal Hodge is a multi-award-winning filmmaker and a Bram Stoker Award Nominated Writer. An active member of the HWA and SFPA, his writing works are in anthologies with notable writers such as Stephen King, Chuck Palahniuk, Stephen Graham Jones, Alma Katsu, and Josh Malerman. Jamal has earned Rhysling Award nominations in 2021, 2022, and 2024, with his poem “Colony” winning 2nd place at the 2022 Dwarf Stars. His book, The Dark Between the Twilight, debuted as the #1 hot new American Poetry Release and was nominated for a 2024 Bram Stoker award. His anthology, Bestiary of Blood: Modern Fables & Dark Tales (2024), launched as the #1 New Horror Anthology Release on Amazon and features 18 Bram Stoker award-winning writers. His newest poetry book, Everything Endless (2025), is a collaboration with Grand Master Linda D. Addison and is published by Raw Dog Screaming Press.
Everything Endless is a collection of micro poetry, called “Dwarf Poems” by Hodge in his introduction. This would imply poems eligible for the Dwarf Star Award, started by Deborah P. Kolodji for the SFPA. Hodge, of course, is a former Dwarf Star winner, and this collection is clearly an attempt to build on that success. The poems are science fiction in nature, and while they explore the darker aspects of humanity, there is a hopefulness as well. The book itself is organized in a conversational “call and response” form, as though the poems are echoing and bouncing off each other, informing each other as the book moves forward.
When the poems use rich imagery, metaphor, juxtaposition, using all the craft tools one would expect from micropoetry, they work well enough as individual poems. There is a cleverness and wry irony that permeates this collection, and the when the poets are able to work that tone into a poetic organization, the book all but sings. Take, for example, these opening lines from “Alien Blues” by Addison:
the day i came to earth
my soul was low
though you don’t think i have one
looking for a song for my people
i was so low
and you shot me down
my planet all gone
i want a song for my people
a riff, for a lost planet.
But one dark night
at the crossroads to the universe
you shot me down
Addison is using the blues form to create a poem spoken from an alien. The clever use of blues idioms (“shot me down,” “crossroads of the universe”) and the idea of “alien” as other is rich in this poem, and creating a striking afro-futurist piece. Hodge’s response is his award winning “Colony”:
The red soil of Mars
cannot truly be our home
until one man kills another.
Preferably, for no reason,
other than,
it’s the earthiest thing,
an earthman
can do.
Readers can already sense the way the poems inform and respond to each other, as well as the way Hodge and Addison weave their voices in and out of each other’s work.
With that being said, there are points when this collection seems under curated and the poems teeter into abstraction and cliche. Take, for example, the cyberhorror piece “Awake” by Hodge:
After death,
we laugh,
when we wake up.
Poems like this detract from the narrative arc of the collection, as well as the horror and anxiety that permeates the collection. While one could see a poem like this as an amuse bouche in the greater meal of the collection, their frequency makes for a rather uneven collection.
Overall, for readers interested in Science Fiction Horror, especially one tinged with the dread of interstellar space, the unknowns of travel, and the sacrifice of oneself for a better future, this collection will certainly pique their interest. Despite a smattering of weaker poems that come across as too abstract and clever to be consistent with this collection, readers will be sure to find something rewarding in this book. The conversation between two award-winning horror poets alone is worth the price of admission, and this book will be sure to capture the attention of fans of speculative poetry.
