Speculative poetry travels winding roads leading to wondrous worlds, regions never traversed by mainstream verse. Fantastic poems range in the material they treat from the strange but explainable to the utterly fanciful, from horror to wonder, and from the rigidly verisimilitudinous to the purely surrealist. They may utilize traditional prosody or may avail themselves of the discontinuities and fragmentation of modernist free verse. They may use as setting the primary world, a secondary world, or a combination of the two. With roots planted firmly in the mythic and folkloric epics and ballads of yore, and branches reaching high into the endless skies of modern fantasy, science fiction, and horror, speculative poetry is a historic and vital poetic genre, the source of the most thoughtful, imaginative verse being written today.

Red Sky features over 100 years' worth of speculative poetry from yesterday's masters, modern award winners, and emerging stars. Filled with luminous ideas, otherworldly adventures, metaphysical encounters and startling futuristic speculations, these poems will appeal to all readers as they chart the emergence and evolution of speculative poetry.