Puncture Wounds

Bruce Whealton

June 2013 · eBookIt.com

About this eBook

Poems about Vampires, vampirism and related creatures...Jean Jones writes regarding Scott Urban's poems, "how can a mature writer respond to the vampire myth which by its sheer repetition through pop culture has become a cliche in poetry and writing much less movies and T.V. show. It is almost impossible to go into this venue and not walk through trite expressions and empty cliches. What is there new to say about vampires? The connection between sex and death, sex and fear, fear and desire, etc. etc.? Well, thankfully, Scott Urban walks into the Count's castle, so to speak, most especially in "By Way of Reply," where one can almost literally hear "Bela Lugosi is Dead" by Bauhaus, and the quite undead Count writes a letter back to one of his latest victims, the person's blood drippling off his face, as he recounts the sorrows of his life; and in "Lamia," the poor narrator, like an Edgar Allan Poe character, both fears and desires after what will happen to him. Scott Urban writes of Bruce Whealton's work, "Whenever it seems as if the figure of the vampire has been finally laid to rest -- truly dead instead of undead -- a new take, a fresh interpretation comes along and shakes up the bat-drenched mythos. Anne Rice did it in the 1970s with Interview with a Vampire, Nancy Collins did it in the 1980s with Sunglasses After Dark, and Stephanie Meyer did it in the 2000s with the Twilight series. Nor is the vampire a stranger to the poetic arts; authors as wide-ranging and well-known as John Keats, Charles Baudelaire, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge have all offered us poetic descriptions of life after the first death. Walking straight into this cobwebbed realm is North Carolina's Bruce Whealton. Bruce peels aside the flimsy faaade of society to reveal the corroded, crumbling underpinnings below. Perhaps not surprisingly, the vampire seems to be supremely adapted to survive in the barely-contained chaos we call modern life. All around us, we see structures and institutions we once thought eternal brought low in less than a day. But those who drain not just blood but souls, as we see in "Shelter" and "Amanda's Eyes," care nothing for the dissolution of civilization; in anything, they welcome the reversion to a more basic, primitive existence. Bruce even looks back in time, in "First Transgression" and "On the Run," to to an Edenic golden age, but to a primal conflict between the forces of evil and humanity's better nature -- if we can even claim that much of an advantage over the beasts. Here, in terse, emotion-packed lines, are both the seductive allure and rampant savagery of the vampire, significantly re-invented for our time. Read on -- while you still can.

About the author

Bruce Whealton began to think of himself as a poet beginning back in 1992, when he shared his poetry at a poetry reading for the first time. This was at the Coastline Convention Center overlooking the Cape Fear River, in Wilmington, NC. He began Word Salad as an online poetry magazine in 1995. Bruce M. Whealton received his Bachelor's Degree, in Electrical Engineering, specializing in Computer Engineering, from Georgia Institute of Technology in December of 1989. He worked for a number of years at Digital Equipment Corporation in MA prior to the growth and popularity of the Internet. Following that job, he worked with the National Science Foundation developing a VAX-based network programmed in the C language. Since the start of the web and the internet, Bruce was designing and developing websites in various capacities. His first website was an online poetry magazine called Word Salad Poetry Magazine which is still in operation on the web here. Visit that site to see how it has grown. He also is a poet and writer when he is not doing these other activities. Bruce brings his creativity and technical skills to designing and developing web sites. Bruce Martin Whealton, Jr. was born in 1966, to parents were Bruce Whealton and Kathleen Murphy Whealton. On November 5, 2011 Bruce Married Elnaz Rezaei Ghalechi in Ankara, Turkey. My parents inspired me to excel in certain ways from the beginning. I'm talking about the beginning, specifically. In the early years we are first challenged in school. Bruce Whealton completed the Webmaster Certificate Program at NC State's Computer Training Unit a few years back. However, most of his practical skills come from working in this field and self-paced, self-directed studies. Like many fields, continuing education is a must to keep up with the evolving technologies in this field. Bruce reports, "I've found the training library at Lynda.com, Pluralsight and InfiniteLearning to be a very valuable assets along with numerous texts on a wide-range of topics in this field." Over the years, Bruce Whealton has completed many, many online courses covering various tools, programming languages, markup languages and more. This includes keeping up with the latest technologies such as HTML5 and CSS3 which bring new capabilities and features to the web, for a more modern, interactive and engaging web experience. Bruce also has seen his poems published in: - The Houston Literary Review - The Talon - UNCW poetry and prose publication - Death Head Grin - Calliope Nerve - The Horror Zine and the Horror Zine's associated Anthology "And Now the Nightmare Begins: The Horror Zine." - Aphelion: The Webzine of Science Fiction and Fantasy - 9 of my poems - Venus Rising - Childe Bryde - the thin edge of staring - lines written w/a razor - Gravity Hill - by St. Andrews Press - Chance Magazine - lunatic chameleon - Mystic Prophet - The Anthology entitled "Simple Vows," which was put together by folks from St. Andrews College. In the not too distant past he placed in the Robert Roarke Poetry contest with a Haiku piece.