Yesterday on Twitter, for my 33rd birthday, I unveiled a special surprise – an upcoming dinosaur poetry book! It will be released from Kindle Direct Publishing on March 9, 2020.
Emerge from the seas; guard your eggs from the storm; crawl inside a T-rex’s skull. On a time-traveling poetic journey from the Late Heavy Bombardment to the present day, Ada Hoffmann uses ancient life to explore questions of trauma, power, survival, and how we see ourselves.
The cover art is by the wonderful Kelsey Liggett, who also did art for ROBOT DINOSAURS! The image above is a mock-up, posted with permission – the art is final, but we’re still working on the fonts and other design elements. Kelsey will also be doing several interior illustrations.
MILLION-YEAR ELEGIES is something I’ve been working on for years – most of the poetry was written between 2015-2017, but it took longer to figure out where and how I wanted to put the whole thing out in the world. It’s been a labor of love and a project very close to my heart – both because DINOSAURS!! (a recurring special interest) and because the theme of ancient life has given me so much room to explore personal, powerful things.
I’m calling it “dinosaur poetry” because of course I am, and there are going to be lots of big meaty dinosaur poems in here, but it’s also beyond just dinosaurs; each poem is named after a different ancient creature, ranging from the origins of life to the recent past.
If you want a taste of what these poems are like, I can link you to four that are already published:
“Tyrannosaurus,” in Uncanny Magazine
I will be old and never realize
why I crave an armor made of razor bones.
“Hallucigenia,” in Liminality
Yet he cannot quite believe
what he sees with his eyes: this shape
lacking head or tail, the sheer spinesplotchy
patched-together matter-of-factness of you.
“Edmontonia,” in Mythic Delirium
the bold heavy beat
of a heart that knows weight and grins
in its midst
“Oviraptor,” in Strange Horizons
Maybe I ate you after all,
my egg, my tiny everything
These four – plus “Archaeopteryx,” which appeared in Asimov’s Magazine – are the only previously published works appearing in this collection; the rest is brand new and written specifically for the book.
You can pre-order the Kindle edition of Million-Year Elegies here. Closer to the release date, when the book is formatted and the illustrations are ready, there will also be a paperback edition.