Synopsis
Let your eyes adjust to the darkness contained within this unparalleled tome of terrifying poetry. Let yourself be drawn down into the mausoleum of decayed verbiage and grim visions, meeting the poets your mortician always warned you about. These seventeen international authors gathered in the cemetery are already well known within horror poetry circles for their diverse imaginations. Deftly shifting from free verse to sonnets, from grotesque to darkly comical, the Cemetery Poets scream from beyond the grave with deadly accuracy. Editor Peggy Jo Shumate asks, "Do you have a dread of shadowy places?" The answer, after reading Cemetery Poets: Grave Offerings, will undoubtedly be a resounding yes! Step inside the cemetery gates and savor every wretched flavor of fear ever conceived.

CEMETERY POETS: GRAVE OFFERINGS
poets within:

Dave Bowlin
Peggy Jo Shumate
L.J. Blount
Michael Arnzen
Paul Kane
Matt Hewitt
Kurt Newton
Brian Rosenberger
Scott Urban
Susanne S. Brydenbaugh
Christina Sng
Steven L. Shrewsbury
G.W. Thomas
John Lawson
Megan Powell
J.D. Pearce
L. Lynn Young

Cemetery Poets: Grave Offerings
The Brutal Introduction:
The world's a tough place. to survive, you have to be. BRUTAL!

Do you have a dread of shadowy places? Do you get Goosebumps when you read terrifying words and hear chilling stories beyond the deathly realms? Do you fear that claw-like hand bursting through the graveyard or that tombstone spelling your name? Are you apprehensive about turning the next page of this book? Boo!

Yes! You reply.

Good! I have you in my death grip and you have now entered the graveyard prose! There's no way out .brave reader, you must journey on into a world we poets take you: To worlds filled with Pandora's Box, surreal visions of Hell, and even meeting yourself face-to-face on the other side.

I have a very strange tale to tell you. Some very vivid and surreal occurrences have happened in the world around us. We dare not think of what horrors lay in the minds of the decadent and the wicked with their baneful prose.

You've now become our devoted reader of poetic words of panic! Lend your ears (and souls) to the Cemetery Poets! They've gathered in the graveyard and are chanting their elegies. Their mournful wails float through the branches in the vein Edgar Allen Poe. Chills are sure to dance upon your skin and prickle your tender flesh with Goosebumps. Like Poe's work, dark sinister, yet legible if you read it and understand it. if you - open your mind to his dementia: The Cemetery Poets will allow visuals to seep into your mind, you might be startled at first, you might even be more frightened with how much you relate to these terrors, the demons of your own panic-stricken psyche. One thing is for certain, however, you will realize how these poets are truly poetically sane for the insane.

The wide variety of Poets in this book has ideas of the 'dark side' and what lies beneath the graveyard of bones and flesh. These menagerie of Poets have a told of their fanciful surreal encounters with the Grim Reaper! I hope the prose inside these sacred pages send shivers down your spine and leave you with the feeling of dread. Instead of Nightmares and Dreams - I hope you are haunted with eternal Nightscreams.

by Peggy Jo Shumate

November 2002