Erik Fuhrer
my buffed up life
My Buffed Up Life is both a love letter to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and a survival story. Fuhrer’s work is a testament to how art can comfort and heal, give us hope, even in our darkest hours, even when the vampires look like ordinary people and walk in daylight, even when the Hell Mouth is inside of us.
Jessica Drake-Thomas
Author of Burials, Bad Omens, and Hollow Girls
The Ocean and ITs Movers
Lyrical and spellbinding, The Ocean and Its Movers pulls you in with all of the mysterious, insistent power of its eponymous character – inviting you, and its troubled heroines, to brave the unexpected. Equally nourishing and commanding, melancholy and funny, Ocean’s whimsy never outpaces its wit as Fuhrer’s unsettling tale of transformation unfolds.
Eric Glover
Author of Black Star
Gellar Studies is what arises when the academic genre of writing about an iconic body of work meets the personal essay. It is as much an examination of the impact of Sarah Michelle Gellar’s work on a queer viewer as it is a personal meditation on childhood and queer trauma and the ways in which the work of particular media figures offers a space not only for identification but for performativity of a life lived otherwise. The traumas that the speaker of the poems has experienced unfold through parallels and possibilities ignited by the work of Gellar that provide ways of processing, and entry points into healing.
Gellar Studies
"Gellar Studies will be exceptionally delectable and devastating for Gen X LGBTQIA+ readers who are familiar with Sarah Michelle Gellar's iconic work, but I am confident that any reader will quickly submerge themselves in Fuhrer's stunning, surreal, and powerful waters, hoping to never come up for air."
Addie Tsai
Author of Unwieldy Creatures
From the Introduction to Gellar Studies
Eye, Apocalypse
The Apocalypse as love story, as a MAGA hat, as a poem: the Apocalypse personified. This collection by Erik Fuhrer showcases their skill at making the fantastical mundane and the mundane fantastical. Every piece in this book has a lingering bite, a tiny world-ender that sinks into you and doesn’t let go.
Cathy Ulrich
Author of Ghosts of You
In which I take myself hostage
This book of poems is a horror film. It is a book in which the weird transformations, animate horror, and tender gore of Argento, Cronenberg, and Carpenter receive a horrible rebirth in language. Bodies invaded by flies, walls covered with cockroaches, spores that ache to sicken you proliferate within these pages, squarely sourced in the soil of the everyday. Read this book; insert these poems into your skin.
Ali Raz
Co-author of Human Tetris
VOS
“Inspired by Woolf’s first novel, ‘The Voyage Out,’ precisely to cut her words loose from any settled meanings, Erik Fuhrer’s ‘VOS’ shimmers with the multiplicity and plasticity of language. The result is a remarkable series of poems that assemble human and nonhuman (as well as what Fuhrer calls ‘Honestly inhuman’) life in playful, strange, intimate, and often surreal arrangements.”
Derek Ryan
Author of Virginia Woolf and the Materiality of Theory
Not human enough for the census
In Erik Fuhrer's not human enough for the census, there are creatures of dark habits, organ breathers, tree butchers, and 1 in 100 scientists agree the state of god is liquid. In these poems, aftermath requires a new language. Dust and ash compound with mother and father, mud compounds with blossom. These spare lyrics contain numerous transformations, and"just because the body is gone/does not mean the absence of body is gone." Absences loom everywhere--the mouth, the breath, the treacherous god in the tempest.
Traci Brimhall
Author of Our Lady of the Ruins
every time you die
"This new collection by Erik Fuhrer is as the title suggests - it deals with death. Ironically, what makes this collection truly unique is that each relatively short poem is fully alive, vibrant and possesses a cathartic power that is both personal and universal. Here is a poet who is a master of metaphor and creates lucid narratives that are layered with complexities that capture an inspired fusion of loss and enlightenment."
Kevin Pilkington
Author of Where You Want to Be: New and Selected Poems