The Kasturi/Files: Episode 8: Alien vs. Aliens

Welcome back to The Kasturi/Files at Speculative Chic, Day 8 of our October horror show of movies, books, and cocktails! We’re covering a couple of older movies today, so if you haven’t seen these yet, well, we guess there are spoilers? But, come on. There has to be a “best before” date. Like if the movie came out twenty years ago or more, you don’t have to say “spoiler alert.” Rosebud is a sled. Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father. Okay?

Brace yourself, darlings. Maybe against the back of a comfortable chaise longue. We have a lot to say about these movies! Here we go.

Sandra Kasturi: Today we’re going to talk about two of my favorite films: Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), and James Cameron’s Aliens (1986). Most discerning horror viewers tend to like the original best, with the second film coming in a close second. But for me — much as I love Alien — it’s Aliens all the way. (It ties with Casablanca for my favorite movie of all time.) The other issue I should probably address is that, technically speaking, both movies are science fiction. They’re set in space, they take place on another world, there are, well, aliens. And I tend to be a snotty purist about this sort of thing, but — here’s the thing. Alien is not just an SF movie, it’s a monster movie, and it’s very much a haunted house movie in tone and structure. Something lurking in the shadows trying to kill you is a horror trope. As for Aliens, well, that’s really a last-stand-Alamo war movie with horror elements. So just work with me here.

I honestly can’t remember when I first saw Alien; it’s as if I ret-conned it into my history and memory so that it’s always been there, like it facehugged me and I never got rid of that thing. I’m fairly certain I can’t have seen it in the theater — I would have been a kid, and there’s no way my mother, who thought Star Trek (OG edition) was too violent, would ever have let me see something like as horrifying as Alien. So . . . rep cinema? TV? VHS? Laserdisc? No idea. But, once discovered, it’s become one of those movies I watch a lot (though maybe not as much as Aliens).

For a quickie plot recap for anyone who hasn’t seen this — the spaceship Nostromo answers a distress call from an alien planet (LV-426); the ship’s computer, “Mother” wakes up the crew who’s been in hypersleep and has them go down to see what’s what. What’s what, of course, is that they find a derelict spaceship, clearly not built by humans. And a room of . . . giant egg-things. Kane (John Hurt) goes closer to examine the eggs, and one opens up and presto! The infamous facehugger pops out and latches onto him and sticks its . . . sexual metaphor . . . ovipositor down his throat. Later, the creature seems to come off on its own, and Kane looks fine. Not so! In what is probably one of the most iconic scenes in movie history, Kane goes into convulsions and something bursts out of his chest. We cleverly call this a chestburster. The crew tries to hunt down the alien (which is very small). Little do they know that the thing is going to grow into the monstrous xenomorph very quickly. The crew gets picked off one by one, including the intrepid captain, Dallas (Tom Skerritt). Now in charge, Warrant Officer Ripley (Sigourney Weaver in what is arguably her most famous role), finds out that it wasn’t a distress call coming from the planet but a warning. And the crew’s real mission by the (evil) Company was to retrieve the xenomorph, and that said crew was expendable. Ash, the science officer (Ian Holm), turns out to be an android, and tries to kill Ripley to prevent her from killing the alien. The remaining crew work to rid the ship of the monster, to no avail, and get killed. With only Ripley and the cat Jonesy remaining, Ripley sets the ship to self-destruct and flees in an escape pod. Of course, the alien is on board, but Ripley finally blows it out the airlock.

Alien is just about perfect every moment it’s on screen. I’d say the only real disconnect comes at the very end, when the xenomorph gets jettisoned into space, and it does kind of look like a guy in a costume. But this is 1979. I’m willing to forgive a few bad F/X for something that is this close to perfection. And whenever you only see part of the alien — a claw, that mouth (that other mouth! gah!), the long swoop of that weird head. All that H.R. Giger awful (wonderful) creature design! It’s brilliant.

Rumor has it that Veronica Cartwright who plays Lambert, was originally going to be the surviving member of the Nostromo crew, but she reacted so badly to the chestburster scene which was, ah, sprung on the cast without them knowing exactly what was going to happen. So those reactions are real. Gemma, do you know if this is a true story? At any rate, Sigourney Weaver ended up being the Final Girl. Maybe one of the earliest Final Girls?

There’s some criticism of Alien and its sexual politics — i.e. forcible “impregnation,” the monster coming out when Ripley takes her clothes off, etc. — and perhaps the movie is of its time. But I am hard pressed to come up with another film that just blew my socks off, scared the living shit out of me, and still holds up forty years later, politics or no politics. What else can do that? Funny you should ask. That’d be Aliens. More on that later.

Gemma Files: My father, actor Gary Files, saw Alien for the first time while on a layover during a trip back to Australia. The first thing he did afterwards was to call my Mom and tell her that on no account was I ever, ever to see Alien. So of course, from then on, that was top of my list. But he was able to prevent me from seeing Alien in a theater, as opposed to on VHS . . . and you know, I actually think I might have seen Aliens before I finally saw Alien, the first time with my friends. The second time, I saw it with my Dad. 😉

Even today, 1979 effects and all, Alien remains a ground-breaking achievement: a startlingly efficient melding of hard science fiction and straight-up horror, a blending of two genres to produce a third. You called it a haunted house movie in outer space, but looking back on it, the phantom whose invisible presence Ripley and her doomed crewmates labor most directly under is that of the Company itself. It’s always there, unseen yet palpable, watching everybody but with no one’s best interest in mind, aside from its own; we glimpse it only in the empty spaces — in what Mother leaves out of the briefings, in what Ash neglects to tell people because he’s working from a completely separate set of rules the others literally don’t “need to know” about. The crew already knows they’re disposable, just not how easily the Company will make that particular call if they find something better, something they can snap up and sell rather than something they have pay, or pay for. It’s the horror of runaway capitalism, except that back then it was just a dystopic future vision. Today, we’re living inside of it. (Alien: Gig Economy — that’s my pitch for the next sidequel.)

I don’t actually know if that story about Veronica Cartwright is true, though I believe both Lambert and Ripley were originally written as male; what I’d heard was that Ridley Scott first cast Cartwright as Ripley, then saw Weaver somewhere and slotted her in in instead, but gave Lambert to Cartwright because she’d already traveled back to England before the change was made. One way or the other, it makes a lot more sense to have a mixed-gender crew of “long-haul space truckers,” if only from the simple POV of trying to make things realistic — and I love James Cameron for carrying that idea on into Aliens, where he decreased the male-to-female ratio even further. Sure, it probably just has to do with his general fetish for strong women wielding big guns, but I’m certainly down.

And yes, Ripley may not be the first Final Girl (that’s probably either Sally Hardesty from Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Jess Bradford from Black Christmas, both 1974, though Laurie Strode definitely codified the trope in 1978’s Halloween), but she remains the best not only in my own not-so-humble opinion, but in the opinion of a lot of women I respect. It might be a generational thing; I know people who were body-slammed by Alien Resurrection, which they treated as a betrayal: Ripley cross-bred with the monster she died fighting in Alien 3, essentially made into a hybrid xenomorph queen? Heresy. But I’ll take more Weaver pretty much anyhow I can get her.

For me, however, the quality that shot Alien above and beyond was Swiss madman H.R. Giger’s biotechnological designs — not just the xenomorph itself, with its skittering severed mummy’s hand of a force-fed egg-delivery mechanism, its utterly disgusting larval/fetal stage and its horrifyingly beautiful full-grown self (blind Nefertiti head, fixed smile hiding a toothy tongue, whipping spike-tail and all), but also the downed ship they find carrying a belly-full of its acid blood-laden progeny, with its bony carve, its leathery vaginal openings, the entirely hand-airbrushed corpse of the gigantic “space jockey” (or Engineer in full uniform, if you prefer). From the moment we see that ship on Kane’s viewscreen, in stark, slightly pixelated blue and grey, the whole universe becomes, and stays, real. Aliens exist: there’s something they made. There’s what flew it. There’s what killed its crew. There’s what’s going to kill yours… and you.

Bet you’re really glad you took that grinding, unglamorous, fairly well-paying yet never quite well-paying enough job in outer space now, huh?

Sandra: What a beautiful way to say all this. I’m so enamored of that penultimate paragraph! I was just gonna go, “Me likey!”

You know, when Gemma and I were first talking about doing Aliens for this horror movie column, we spent, literally, about an hour back and forth on Messenger, saying our favorite lines to each other.

• “Yeah, but it’s a dry heat.”
• “Hey Vasquez, have you ever been mistaken for a man?” “No. Have you?”
• “Guess she don’t like the cornbread neither.”
• “This little girl survived longer than that with no weapons and no training.” “Yeah? Well, maybe you should put her in charge!”
• “They mostly come at night. Mostly.”
• “You always were an asshole, Gorman.”
• “He can’t make that kind of decision! He’s just a grunt! No offense.” “None taken.”
• “Well, whoopee fuckin’ shit!”
• “Ripley, she doesn’t have bad dreams ’cause she’s just a piece of plastic.”
• “Smoking or non-smoking?”
• “What are we supposed to use? Harsh language?”
• “Ay-firmative!”
• “I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.”

And the two greatest lines ever: “That’s it! Game over, man! Game over!” And the iconic “Get away from her, you BITCH!”

Points to everyone who can identify who said what! (Note they are not in chronological order, and of course, as we’re quoting from memory, these may be slightly inaccurate. Which is why you get things like “Play it again, Sam!” which is not actually in the movie. Casablanca, not Aliens.)

Really fast — er, not-so-fast — recap: A salvage crew finds a drifting shuttle containing the hypersleeping Ripley and Jonesy. Ripley wakes up in a hospital and eventually finds out that nearly sixty years have passed since the events of Alien. She has to explain to the bigwigs at Weyland-Yutani why she blew up their very expensive ship. No one believes her stories about aliens, and she loses her rank, being forced to work on a loading dock rather than with another spaceship crew. Ripley also finds out that LV-426 has been inhabited by terraformers, and no one has ever reported anything unusual. The Weyland rep, Burke, sympathizes with her, but is unable to help. Ripley still has crippling nightmares because of her trauma. One evening Burke and a marine, Lt. Gorman show up at her door. They’ve lost touch with the colony on LV-426. Ripley agrees to go with the marines and Burke to see what’s up. What’s up, of course, is that aliens have decimated the colony. The marines land, and find everyone missing, except one little girl, Newt (Carrie Henn), whom Ripley bonds with. The rest of the colonists are found in a kind of alien nest, but the marines are way out of their depth, with half of them getting killed or taken when they attempt a rescue, but Ripley manages to save some of them. The survivors retreat, weld doors shut, send out a distress call, and try to figure a way out of their predicament, but can’t expect rescue for at least a couple of weeks. In the meantime, the ship’s android, Bishop (Lance Henriksen), whom Ripley understandably doesn’t trust, seems fascinated by the aliens (they find facehuggers in tanks in the med lab), and dissects one to study its inner workings. Ripley confronts Burke privately because he sent the colonists to the location of the derelict ship to check out Ripley’s story, and he is the direct cause of the colony getting infected/destroyed. While Newt and Ripley try to get some sleep, Burke lets out a couple of the pickled (but still living) facehuggers from the tanks, and Ripley and Newt barely escape with their lives. Corporal Hicks (Michael Biehn, at his most dishy), who’s now in charge, with some help from Hudson (the late, great Bill Paxton), decides to frag Burke, but before they do, the aliens attack and most of the remaining marines are killed. Newt and Ripley get separated, and it looks like all is lost. Ripley tracks Newt, but just before she can grab her, an alien snatches her, for cocooning and “impregnation.” While this is going on, Bishop has been trying to get the other dropship down from the Sulako so they can escape, as all the gunfire has set off a chain reaction, and the whole place is about to go nuclear. Ripley suits up with all kinds of armaments, and goes back to find Newt. She saves her, but then, in one of the most hair-raising moments in cinema history, Newt and Ripley end up in the alien nest with the Queen alien laying eggs. Horrifying. They escape, but the Queen follows. They make it onto the dropship, piloted by Bishop and the whole site turns into an atomic cloud. Yay, it’s over! Of course: it’s emphatically not. In an epic battle to end all battles, Ripley has to fight the alien Queen, while strapped into a dock loader. Just astonishing.

Unlike with Alien, I remember exactly when I first saw Aliens. The year it came out, but not in a regular theater. At the Cinesphere at Ontario Place in Toronto. On the giant screen, several stories high. I don’t think I’ve ever had such a tense movie experience (except maybe during The Ring or The Others, and not even quite then), but it was amazing. When the alien Queen came out . . . I nearly squealed in glee and terror. Since then, I regularly re-watch the film, and also just . . . watch parts of it, if it’s late at night and I don’t feel like going to bed yet. I also dream of aliens, my “Night Kitchen” brain coming up with horrifying sequels to these movies. In space, no one can hear you scream, but in dreams, no one can help you run faster.

I adore Ripley. She’s always been my hero. I love the camaraderie of the marines, and I love that there are men and women, and they act like assholes, and they tease each other and give each other shit, and it doesn’t seem to matter what gender they are. I love Vasquez and Drake’s friendship. I love how the Sarge doesn’t take any shit but still really cares about his troops. Everything. I love everything. I also like to watch for the clever ways that Cameron cheats the screen. There wasn’t a lot of money to do some of the effects, but they manage certain things really well. If you look closely when the sleeping pods first open, there are in fact only two pods — the rest are mirrors. So clever! The only thing I don’t love is the director’s cut of the film.

While the extendamix of Alien added to that movie, I can’t bear the director’s cut of Aliens. It completely drains the movie of any dramatic tension, and gives Ripley a whole motivation and back story she never needed. One of the criticisms of Aliens was that it took too long to get to LV-426, that there was too much buildup. But it’s the buildup that creates so much tension. We saw the first movie. We know things have gone wrong. So we’re waiting for them to go really wrong this time. The tension is so heightened when the marines are creeping through the hallway of the building complex, that when something suddenly jumps across in front of them, we nearly pee our pants. Now that, my friends, is a jump scare. (But it turns out to be Newt. Whew!) And then when you finally see the alien — and not just one, but a whole nest of them — it’s absolutely horrifying. James Cameron’s preferred cut shows us planet LV-426 right away, with Newt, her brother and her parents driving to check out the spaceship, and of course a facehugger gets Newt’s dad. The tension is completely eliminated! Now we already know exactly what happened, even before the movie has properly got going! And Ripley’s tragedy that she outlived her daughter — bah, humbug. We didn’t need to see that! How about Ripley saves Newt because it’s the RIGHT THING TO DO. Yeah. The only scene in the extended version of Aliens that is actually interesting and useful is the “smartgun” action — watching the ammo run out creates extra tension. So, watch the theatrical release, and accept no substitutes. (Which may be harder than you think. You might have to buy one of the Blu-ray box sets. Well, you should do that anyway, really.)

Gemma: One thing that’s interesting in context is that two generations (at least) have grown up with the Extended Versions as options, whereas you and I probably saw the Theatrical Cuts first, which really pops out when you think about the fact that the repeated nightmare phrase for Ripley — the core of her fear of the xenomorphs — is expressed in that phrase from her post-rescue dream: “Kill me . . . Kill me!” Which is actually in the Director’s Cut of Alien; she finds Dallas, all cocooned in slime/impregnated and he begs her for mercy using exactly those words, at which point she flamethrowers him and all the other incubators. But we didn’t know that, at the time.

Sometimes I have difficulty distinguishing one cut from another, aside from the fact that I agree essentially the longer cut of Alien improves it, while the longer cut of Aliens doesn’t — like you say, it shoehorns in the whole “Ripley’s daughter aged and died while she was lost in space” subplot, thus giving her “motive” to bond with Newt, like if she didn’t have a kid of her own to miss she’d just let a traumatized little girl stay feral. Not to mention that adoptive motherhood vs biological motherhood sort of underlies Ripley’s face-off with the queen, along with a high dose of good, old-fashioned: “Yeah, I guess we made a bargain but . . . you’re horrible and I hate you, you fucking slug, so screw it.” Is that Ripley being a mother, though, or is it just species vs species, each equally committed to the idea that their particular biology is the only one which deserves to survive?

Then again, that whole Ripley/Newt subplot recently led into a rather annoying analysis of the whole series from the otherwise dependably brilliant podcast Faculty of Horror, in which Andrea Subisatti and Alex West ended up saying that Fincher’s Alien 3 was the best installment because Newt got killed off right at the start, and nothing that happened in it had anything to do with motherhood. Which . . . I mean, I certainly get A) not wanting kids or B) not wanting all women to be defined by whether or not they’re mothers, but the problem with making Ripley female is that when you can reproduce biologically and can essentially be made to do so without your consent, this might possibly be something that’s gonna come up now and again, especially while fighting a predator species that breeds by forcibly impregnating other live animals. Of course, a large part of the horror of xenomorphs in general is that they can “rape” men as well as women, thus proving their insectoid, alien nature. It’s a gross, gross conundrum.

Sandra: You are so right. I can’t believe the Faculty of Horror folks so blatantly missed the point. And Alien 3 is the best? Bitch, please. I just watched it again recently (original and extended versions), because I wanted to see how I’d feel about it so many years later. I’d never re-watched that one, because, like most of us, I was so angry that Newt and Hicks got killed off-screen, and in a kind of narratively pointless “sorry, we couldn’t get these actors back” kind of way. But still — it was directed by David Fincher who went on to do amazing things like Seven and Fight Club. Well, it turns out Alien 3 is a perfectly fine movie, in the sense that it’s got great actors, good pacing, is interesting visually, etc. But . . . it didn’t really need to be part of the franchise. It could have been any monster. So, it didn’t do it for me. But William Gibson’s script for a third Alien movie is pretty good, and you can check it out online and see what you think. And if you don’t want to bother with that, in happy news, they made a full-cast Audible release of it. There’s also the official adaptation of Gibson’s screenplay as a comic from Dark Horse! So Faculty of Horror can suck it.

As for Alien Resurrection, I kind of shamefacedly like it — the film has that beautiful sepia tint that Jean-Pierre Jeunet does, and it’s such a weird, grotesque, French kind of take on the Alien movies. Even Winona Ryder doesn’t irritate too much. Her blankness translates well into playing an android. And that underwater sequence is just amazing. Plus: Ron Perlman! Michael Wincott! Brad Dourif!

Gemma: And Aliens is a war/action movie while Alien isn’t, yadda yadda. But the war part of Aliens set the standard for all platoon-based character interaction to follow, and the spine of both narratives remains Horror with a big H — body horror, siege horror, survival horror, existential horror, cosmic horror. Plus dystopic runaway capitalism horror yet again, with “artificial humans” redeemed through the character of Lance Henriksen’s Bishop after the gooshily awful reveal of Ash’s undercover nature in Alien (Lambert to Ripley, in cut dialogue: “You ever sleep with Ash?” Ripley: “No. You?” “Nope.”), and the Company repped here by ultimate Company Man Carter Burke (Paul Reiser), a lying shit-sack in a nice suit, creepily fake-apologetic even as he’s plotting to smuggle xenomorphs back to earth in the bodies of those who disagree with him about their utility. Much like Hellraiser and Hellbound: Hellraiser II, I’m still sold on the necessity of both, though more woke folks decry Aliens as a two-hour plus commercial for the U.S. Marines; I really don’t want one without the other.

Finally, though I’m not going to die on this hill today, I have to admit I really do like Prometheus — I watch it far more often than most people think I should, and not just for Fassbender’s utterly convincing portrayal of an artificial human just waiting for the one person who can give him orders that supersede all others, to die. Not to mention that I love dark raygun gothics, and Chariots of the Gods panspermia bullshit, and narratives where everything goes wrong, especially when it’s because smart people keep on doing dumb things because they get emotionally overwrought about their faith or lack thereof. But that’s me.

Sandra: A few years ago, my husband said, “Have you seen this?” And he pointed me to the news that there was going to be another Alien movie. Directed by Ridley Scott. Starring Michael Fassbender. And Idris Elba. And I felt like there was a God. And it was like She had looked into my soul and said, “Here are all your most fervent desires!” And then the Devil interfered, and we got Prometheus. Yeah, yeah, I know you like it, Gemma, but we’ll have to argue about that another time. I do think Fassbender is great. But I’ll just say one thing: “Gee, I’m a xenobiologist, and I’ve never seen this species, but I think I’ll just put MY UNPROTECTED FACE right up to this alien snake-vagina thing, and I’m sure it’ll be FINE.” I ask you!

I feel like we could probably spend the rest of October talking about these movies, but I think everyone would murder us, so maybe we should calm down and go have a restorative beverage? I’ll probably dream another Aliens sequel tonight, which will be fun! We can argue about that tomorrow.

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Cocktails: Queen Bitch Cocktail

Sandra: I think for Aliens, you need the most horrible drink concoction you can think of, and god bless the internet, here it is. The Queen Bitch Cocktail! I’m just going to let you watch this three-minute little video telling you what to do, because I can’t bear to make a drink that contains something called “apple pucker.”

I did find the Alien Secretion from the fine folks over at Difford’s Guide for Discerning Drinkers, which is made of things I have heard of, like vodka.

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Book Recommendations

Sandra: I quite enjoyed Alan Dean Foster’s novelization of Alien. He gave us the movie, but also added extra insights. The one about the spider wasp will stay with me FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE, THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

He also wrote the Aliens novelization, which I haven’t read but am willing to go with on the strength of the earlier book and Foster’s Star Wars sequel (pre-Empire), Splinter of the Mind’s Eye. (Which is possibly the nerdiest thing I’ve said here yet.)

Armor by John Steakley might work here, as it’s also marines vs. monsters. Steakley is of course well-known for Vampires, which was made into a film with James Woods, er, not terribly well.

There’s also the classic Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card which is definitely a “bug hunt.” However you may feel about his politics, he’s a hell of a writer, and the book is absolutely first rate. But I must add that I have not read the “author’s definitive edition” and I don’t know what that’s about, so YMMV? I should point out, too, that if you have not already seen the Ender movie, don’t do it. Read the book.

Oh! And The Legacy of Heorot by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Steven Barnes, which is kind of . . . Beowulf meets Aliens.

Gemma: Ah yes, book recs! Mmm . . . Lee Hogan’s Belarus Diptych (Belarus and Enemies, ROC, 2002/2003) remains one of the darkest, most luxuriantly cruel hard-ish SF horror series I’ve ever read, charting the colonization of a planet surrounded by what appear to be the floating remnants of a long-dead alien civilization. Said civilization, however, turns out to be less dead then just resting for a long, long time, building up to the cyclical Dance during which they will emerge back out onto the planet’s surface and massacre each other as painfully as possible in order to pare themselves down to the most genetically viable bloodlines — along with anybody else they happen to find there, when that happens. There’s also politics, crazy technology, a serial killer who falls in love with the idea of the Enemies (as the Old Race of evil insect-elves refers to themselves), and a surprise visit from Baba Yaga herself! Maybe.

Sandra: Baba Yaga!! Okay. We really better stop now. Join us tomorrow for more (but less exhaustive and exhausting) movie talk!

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Sandra Kasturi is the publisher of ChiZine Publications, winner of the World Fantasy, British Fantasy, and HWA Specialty Press Awards. She is the co-founder of the Toronto SpecFic Colloquium and the Executive Director of the Chiaroscuro Reading Series, and a frequent guest speaker, workshop leader, and panelist at genre conventions. Sandra is also an award-winning poet and writer, with work appearing in various venues, including Amazing Stories, Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales, Prairie Fire, several Tesseracts anthologies, Evolve, Chilling Tales, ARC Magazine, Taddle Creek, Abyss & Apex, Stamps, Vamps & Tramps, and 80! Memories & Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin. She recently won the Sunburst Award for her short story, “The Beautiful Gears of Dying,” in the anthology The Sum of Us. Her two poetry collections are: The Animal Bridegroom (with an introduction by Neil Gaiman) and Come Late to the Love of Birds. Sandra is currently working on another poetry collection, Snake Handling for Beginners, a story collection, Mrs. Kong & Other Monsters, and a novel, Wrongness: A False Memoir. She is fond of red lipstick, gin & tonics, and Idris Elba.

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Formerly a film critic, journalist, screenwriter and teacher, Gemma Files has been an award-winning horror author since 1999. She has published two collections of short work, two chap-books of speculative poetry, a Weird Western trilogy, a story-cycle and a stand-alone novel (Experimental Film, which won the 2016 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel and the 2016 Sunburst award for Best Adult Novel). Most are available from ChiZine Publications. She has two new story collections from Trepidatio (Spectral Evidence and Drawn Up From Deep Places), one upcoming from Cemetery Dance (Dark Is Better), and a new poetry collection from Aqueduct Press (Invocabulary).