Come Here, Little Lamb – Kobo eBook

Flesh is bait, and skulls are traps in these 31 psychological horror poems about complicity, grief, and the sins we’d commit for love.

Follow the light into the woods, and the roots find your throat. Sell your soul for your daughter, and see what’s riding in your backseat. Sit down to dinner and watch the meat blink back with your father’s eyes. Then take the town up on its invitation to a feast, but don’t ask where the runaway girls went.

Mat Bryant’s debut horror poetry collection tells stories in linked haiku, free verse, rhymed ballads, and shaped poems that break form. From Norse longships to Gulf Coast bayous, from a kitchen table to a battlefield, the monsters are mirrors for real horror: war, addiction, grief, and the violence people do to each other.

How could I forget,
when each day she waits for me,
demanding fresh limbs?
from “Donkey Teeth”

Content warning: graphic violence, sexual violence, child endangerment and abuse, suicide and self-harm, war, addiction, harm to animals, and strong language. For mature readers.

If you’re curious, or depraved enough, to see what comes next,

Come Here, Little Lamb.