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"Sometimes we encounter a writer that makes us wonder what the world would be like if it was fair. Daniel Blackston is one of those. We've seen a couple of his stories elsewhere, and damnit, that feller can write. If the world was fair, he'd have his own fan club. Publishers would be lined up outside his office, pushing and shoving each other to be the first to read his next story. His style and voice are extraordinary for someone with so few published works, but we suspect that his body of work (and reputation) will only grow." Max Keele, Editor Fiction Inferno SFReader.com's Managing Editor Daniel E. Blackston is a man of many faces. Freelance editor, columnist, fiction writer, poet, and award winning essayist - his literary resume is as long and winding as the Yellow Brick Road, though undoubtedly a bit less gilded.  Presently employed, not only as SFReader's M.E., but as Senior Fiction Editor for Pitch-Black, LLC (also, former Senior Speculative Fiction Editor for Futures Mysterious Anthology Magazine), Blackston continues to work with legendary writers such as Tanith Lee - as well as rising stars and soon-to-be-discovered talents in the speculative fiction field. Writers featured in FMAM under his editorial eye include: Ed McKeown, Mary Soon Lee, Howard Andrew Jones, Vera Searles, Christopher Stires, Barbara Tarbox and many other talented writers. He has also helped unpublished writers break into print.
 Blackston's own debut story, "Strategist in Glass" was published as the lead cover story for the Spring 2001 issue of Talebones Magazine. Since then, he has gone on to publish fiction in a variety of venues, such as: Ideomancer Unbound, Future Orbits, Fiction Inferno, SBD Fantasy and Science Fiction, as well as SFReader.com's Webmaster, Dave Felts' now defunct pub, Maelstrom Speculative Fiction.
As short SF review columnist for SFReader.com, Blackston's Firebrand Fiction Reviews has always been one of the site's most popular offerings. During his tenure, Blackston has reviewed dozens of pro and small press publications, both print and online. He has also conducted interviews with leading figures in the SF field such as John O' Neill, Darrell Schweitzer, Greg F. Gifune, Ian Randal Strock, Michael Jasper, and D. Harlan Wilson. "THE PROSE DETECTIVE" Editing and Critique Service for Writers Daniel E. Blackston also offers professional manuscript critiques and edits for writers of fiction and poetry at all lengths. Interested parties should send a brief query by email to dan@sfreader.com with the title "EDIT INQUIRY". A response, including rates and schedule availability, will be sent immediately. Services include general critiques for fiction and poetry, edits of short stories and single poems, as well as collections, chapbooks, novels, or groups of unrelated short stories. Rates very affordable - first-come, first-served basis. Compliments for THE PROSE DETECTIVE Editing and Critique Service: "The best fifty dollars I ever spent."
S.S., short story writer and novelist. "Thanks for working with me to make the story better and publishable ... I do appreciate it very much."
L.F. speculative fiction short story writer. "Your rates are unbelievably cheap!"
M.J. speculative fiction writer. POETRY Daniel's poetry has been widely published in Journals such as: The Mid-America Review, Harp Strings Poetry Journal, Hidden Oak, Poetry Depth Quarterly, The Santa Barbara Review, The Hiram Poetry Review, Moon Reader, The Plastic Tower, and many other small press and Academic journals. His poem "Pisces" published in 2003 at www.astropoetica.com was nominated for a Preditors and Editors Award. Another poem "Two Moons" recently won Third Place in the Harp Strings Poetry Journal "Howard Nemerov 'Storm Windows' Award" for Blank Verse Poetry. Additionally, his Award Winning Essay, "Poetry and Posterity" was printed in 2003 at the Dana Literary Society Online Journal and reprinted in Prism Journal. Recently, Professor Ethan Lewis of the University of Illinois, Springfield, compiled an essay on Blackston's poetry, entitled, "Blackston's Rainbow of Iron." This essay appears below in full. PUBLISHING Watch this space for exciting news about new titles and authors available from Pitch-Black LLC, a publishing company that puts the reader first. www.pitchblackbooks.com "Nothing's more exciting than when it's Pitch-Black." 
Blackston’s "rainbow / of iron" by Dr. Ethan Lewis, Professor University of Illinois, Springfield. When Daniel Blackston and I first corresponded, he mentioned a piece in progress on Hart Crane, with which, still unsatisfied, he would not let others read. Someday, that essay will strike its audience as not only informative, but also clear. For Blackston’s debt to Crane incurs all that poet’s charged syntax – but stops short of miming Crane’s occasional turgidity. This impression, continuous, rings from the opening tercets of the first poem in the (yet unpublished, ed. Note) collection: Picasso’s Eyes What crime were they designed to dream? Spooled in darkness like the shadows twisted under a black cowboy brim, slying through alleys so pitch the pupils glimmered like sable coins, or swindling anywhere a nude woman joins her bed in slow anticipation of brushstrokes like pickaxes struck against bankruptcy and time.¹ The strain in the imagery is recognizable, even enhanced in juxtaposition to figures that confirm a synonymity of poetic figure with conventional logic. How verisimilar, "the shadow twisted under a black cowboy brim," and how reasonably metonymic the likening of eyes to that shadow, both under that brim. But directly above, "Spooled in darkness" – its obliquity lies beyond reproach, for the image proves as comprehensible, though not as logical, as what follows. And the next line makes perfect sense once we adjust to envisioning a concept. I dare say, "slying through alleys" holds its own with a phrase similar in scene and construction: "the muttering retreats / Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels."2 Where Eliot plies hauntingly the misplaced modifier, to suggest streets actually grousing, Blackston reads more grammatically: the subject eyes might well predicate slying. Crane used likewise comparisons to defend his "logic of metaphor." "You ask me how a portent can possibly be wound in a shell ... I ask you how Blake could possibly say that ‘a sigh is a sword of an Angel King’"3 But in fact the examples counter the purveyor’s claim; the selected figures never function "quite independent[ly] of the original definition of the word or phrase or image." And it would, frankly, save in the case of poor work or of what tries to pass for poetry but does not, prove difficult to isolate wholly irrational passages. As Crane implies, "the logic of metaphor ... so organically entrenched in pure sensibility"4 inhabits every reader’s, as well as poet’s, sensibility. The test of recondite poetry consists in how well it catalyzes our propensity to erect order. Blackston’s arduous verses invariably succeed. For all their density, they are catalyzed by verbs that slash through the material: "Bull horns puncture / the night sky / to spear our selfish hearts" ("Taurus"). At times he enhances the violent denotation by committing violence on the verb: Midnight bursts a moon... ...eyes probe me from the river... ("Johnstown: The Iron Gospel") ...unsolvable riddles that flare my eyes skyward... ("Pisces, I") Such cooptions of intransitives for transitive ends underscores, again, the importance of movement for effect. So also does the verbing of nouns – The Amtrack disked the horizon’s Cyclopean stare, ("Echoes, I") – and a predilection for the active over substantive alternative: Fresh love blossoming The way mist flowers beyond snow fields, ... Softly, my body spoons away from yours. Sunlight floods our shadows, our separate shores. ("Love Sonnet") Morris Croll observes of the Baroque ‘how ideas of motion take the place of ideas of rest."5 Blackston’s art may be aptly called "Baroque" for its ornamentation and consequent heaviness, but even more so for its motor impetus. To return to "Taurus," a figure such as Luminous gutters effortlessly heft the stars and moon guides the eye from waters to sky to a grounding of sky in waters. This directing differs considerably from the commonplace reflection of moon in pond. Instead of merely conveying an image for our passive reception, the enacting – importantly, on the poet’s and reader’s part – of an impression persuades verification of it: we having, after all, done it, and not sharing the gutters’ "effortless[ness]." Pound therefore endorses the "moving image,"6 which is often accompanied by a textural feature: concretized, i.e. "hard light."7 Blackston constantly dispenses tangible radiance: five wine-colored petals struggle Through a fault-line in the asphalt ("The Quantum Violet") .... Iron rain patters the lake and dam, patiently ("Johnstown the Iron Gospel") .... The tormented flame pearling a halo... ("Night Candle") These instances each purposely betray that hard results can impress as delicate. An intriguing combination, Blackston’s, ‘twixt steel and fragility – though hardly singular, a mix manifest in all the aforementioned: Crane, Yeats, Eliot, and Pound. The first and last in that list pushed their experiments beyond the multi-connotative to attempt simultaneity. Imagism (as idealized by Pound) allowed that separate lines be read at once, forming "an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time." 9 The most noted instance, The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. 10 is intended to yield a gestalt: no "pictorial fusion..., merely the alternating perception of one or the other ... so that one may choose to consider the faces in terms of the petals, or vice-versa."11 With less compression, Crane aimed at a like end. Parts of The Bridge, especially Part II, "Powhaton’s Daughter," juxtapose verse to marginalia that itself reads as verse. Blackston’s most ambitious work operates similarly. Within superior prose poems (– of the traditional cast: imagistically charged; alliterative; hallucinatory; defamiliarizing language to a degree that prose would not; in other words, neither a laudable postmodern etude pivoting on narrative or experiment in metaphor; nor a pensee masquerading as a poem by virtue of the company it keeps in a collection –) are interpolated tercets further distilling the materia poetica they border: Midnight bursts a moon round as an eye, silvering the crippled wino who doubles by his cane to pinch a penny between his thumb and forefinger. Sad moon masked in a pockmarked face, thumb-tacked above streets of spindly lights in the bloom of convenience stores. Johnstown, a rainbow Of iron and smokestacks A valley of knees... We are invited to spatially re-perceive such passages, so as to render both instantaneously: I romance the sleeping Iron rain patters The exercise inevitably founders on "the inherent consecutiveness of language." Yet Joseph frank employed this phrase in his essay espousing "Spatial form in Modern Literature."12 However imperfect, a sense of the synchronous registers in Blackston’s work – resonates, that is, for readers who will take up the gauntlet akin to the gage the poet himself retrieved. For, as I hope to have shown, in a two-fold sense this poetry challenges – not the reader simply, but also those notions – logic of metaphor, conjunction of hard with soft, simultaneous presentation – which Blackston champions. Notes 1. Daniel E. Blackston, Wild Sonnets (and other playful forms) 2003; an unpublished ms. That merits more than desktop publication. 2. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Proofrock," T.S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays 1909-1950 (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1964) 3. Letter from Hart Crane to Harriet Monroe (October 1912); rpt. In James Scully, ed., Modern Poetics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965) 162. 4. Crane, Ibid., 161. 5. Morris W. Croll, "The Baroque Style in Prose" (1929) ; rpt. In Alexander M. Witherspoon and Frank J. Warnke, eds., Seventeenth Century Prose and Poetry, 2nd Ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace & world, 1982) 1065. Croll submits "the effect of great mass with the effect of rapid motion" as the optimum "formula ... to describe the ideal of the baroque design in all the arts" (1072). 6. Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading [1934] (New York: New Directions, 1960) 52. 7. The Letters of Ezra Pound, ed. D.D. Paige (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1950] 38. See also Pound’s "Hard and Soft in French Poetry" [1918], Literary Essays, 285-89. 8. With Blackston’s violet compare Pound’s (and Johnson’s) "rose in the steel dust ... so light is the urging, so ordered the dark petals of iron" (LXXIV.463; The Cantos of Ezra Pound, (New York New Directions, 1970). 9. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T.S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1968) 4. 10. "In a Station at the Metro," Personae: the Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound [1935], rev. ed. Lea Baechler and A. Walton Litz (New York: New Directions, 1990) 62. 11. John T. Gage, In the Arresting Eye: The Rhetoric of Imagism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1981) 62. 12. The famous piece first appeared in Sewannee Review 53 (1945), the precise quote on page 227 of that journal. http://www.illinoistimes.com/gbase/Gyrosite/Content?oid=oid%3A3283
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