For the past decade, Wade German has become increasingly well-known as a leading figure in weird poetry. In this, his first volume of poetry, German displays the literary polish and weird imagination that has thrust him into the forefront of his field. German draws upon such predecessors as H. P. Lovecraft, George Sterling, and Clark Ashton Smith in the crafting of impeccable sonnets whose every word conveys a soupcon of terror and fantasy. Edgar Allan Poe, Robert W. Chambers, and Jack Vance provide the inspiration for other poems that fuse weirdness, pathos, and mystery in an inextricable amalgam. But German's work is far from derivative. Although devoted to such traditional forms as the sonnet, the sestina, and the quatrain, his occasional use of free verse is no less meticulous and artistic, conveying in a looser idiom the weird conceptions and images that percolate in his imagination. Wade German is a widely published poet whose work has appeared in Dreams and Nightmares, Weird Fiction Review, Nameless, Spectral Realms, Space and Time, and many other books and periodicals.