The sixth shuttle to emerge from starship Candlemark’s Reckless imprint is Melanie Stormm’s Last Poet of Wyrld’s End: intricate, funny, elegiac, brimming with invention and poetic flourishes, it’s an SFnal take on Li Bai—or an elevated variation of Jackie Chan’s Drunken Master with a soupçon of Moby Dick.

Today I’m thrilled to share the cover for Last Poet, which eloquently distills its content as seen from the synopsis below. The artist is Rhiannon McCullough, masterful at imaginative transmutations of ancient and contemporary myth.

The harbor city of Wyrld’s End, adopted home to the denizens of a human arkship, is rife with deadly conspiracies, pleasure sages, enigmatic sentient indigenous aliens, and the occasional wave of undead. Like any great city, it is also home to the ragged, rugged species of The Common Poet. Zhou Liu Yang is such a poet, with one addition: he possesses a mysterious object with technological abilities which verge on the magical. Trouble is, thanks to a hole in his pocket, he’s lost it…and the wrong sort of people would like to find it. Also, there’s the existential question of lunch, to say nothing of the questions posed by the singing tentacled giants of the deep.

Melanie Stormm is a semi-sentient being living and breathing in New Hampshire, who generally tries not to make a complete mess of things. A known and respected musician in some spheres, unknown and ignored in others, she is also poet, writer of short-fiction and comics to the same varying degree of success. Her short story “A Mohawk Place for Souls” was a finalist for the Hamlin Garland Award for Short Fiction in 2018 and published by Beloit Fiction Journal that same year.

We expect to share Last Poet in late September 2020. Mark your calendars for immersion into the gyres and puzzles within puzzles of Wyrld’s End!