“In Poems to Be Afraid Of, Pixie Bruner transforms phobias into an unsettling map of the places where fear resides: hospital rooms, kitchens, childhood homes, bedrooms, highways, social-media feeds, and the human body itself. Moving between confessional poetry, surreal horror, satire, and visual experimentation, the collection examines both clinically named phobias and the less easily classified fears surrounding illness, motherhood, grief, intimacy, aging, isolation, exposure, and death.
Bruner repeatedly begins with familiar objects, such as buttons and food, and follows them into psychological and bodily extremity. A recurring sequence of “Chroma Poems” associates individual colors with memories, sensations, cultural references, and sources of dread, while other poems manipulate typography, page design, repetition, palindromes, and layered text so that fear becomes part of the physical reading experience.
Darkly comic, confrontational, and deeply vulnerable, Poems to Be Afraid Of treats place as both external landscape and interior architecture. Its rooms and objects retain the emotional residue of illness, domestic conflict, family history, desire, and survival, creating an illustrated poetic atlas of the ordinary spaces.”
Poems to be Afraid Of - The Blurbs and some blurb art I made of them!
“With this collection of wonderful and weird poetry, Pixie Bruner cements her brilliance as one of this decades most inventive writers. I absolutely loved it!”
— Sarah Walker, author, illustrator, coeditor/co-owner Weird Fiction Quarterly
“Pixie Bruner’s latest collection of poems leads your mind through a mirrored house of psychological horror. Each poem reflects something you might see in yourself. The unease they invoke ls real, not from invented conditions of the mind, but because they are real phobias that haunt mankind. Pixie’s word choice captivates. Her brilliant way of mixing multiple sensory details is unque in ways I’ve never read before. Her poems resonate because they address fears you had hoped to forget, yet like an addict, savor until the point of becoming scared. Poems you’ll be afraid of. So true. There is something for everyone who loves horror in this collection.”
— Stephen Schwartz - SchwartzGames.com
“This book is an amazing trip through phobias with poetry and prose poetry. It explores phobias in a way never seen before. This isn’t your average poetry book with remixes of words traipsing through the same topics. This is awe inspiring talent drawing you in and making you think about things you never thought of before this is poems to be afraid of. Pixie Bruner has spent decades honing her craft and it shows through in every line. Bringing forth nightmares in lyrical prose. Whether you laugh or cry is entirely up to you and your individual phobias but you’ll be glad for chance to see through the looking glass either way.
— Jordan Francis -The Mad Poets Street corner, author Sailing Dark Seas and The Sword You Left Behind
“In POEMS TO BE AFRAID OF, Pixie takes us on a queasy, stomach-twisting, anxiety-inducing trip where we face our truest phobias. Your fingers will hover over the corner of each page, forcing you to take a deep breath and hope the next dive isn’t into murkier waters of dread. The book’s intentional graphic style is woven seamlessly into the experience that almost feels subliminal. It conspires with them. It amplifies the unease until each turn of the page is more like an act of courage. And I mean that as the highest compliment. Poetry is designed to stir emotion, but the greatest accomplishment of this collection is how it crawled beneath my skin and lived there even when I put the book down.”
— LISA VASQUEZ , Author, Poet, and Matriarch of Monsters. Editor-in-Chief Memento Mori Ink Magazine.
“The phobia-hung pages of Pixie Bruner’s Poems to Be Afraid Of take us to places where “the things we fear make us monstrous”. Bruner has a deft touch, and a sympathetic one. With phobia after phobia—I’m talking buttons to germs (literally, the book opens and closes with those)—the trauma/dread of dealing with BIG FEARS is unpacked, unfolded and the reader is dared to face them. Shuddering between the profundities of lines like “life is lost so easily, a pair of keys in a junk drawer” to blood-red lines that go for the throat: “A sucking chest wound. Devil’s Food cake soaked in artificial food coloring or insect shell powder” this book is emotionally big, is raw, is screaming, is different and (absolutely most importantly)this book is authentic. Modern horrors presented as poetry. Don’t run from it, embrace it.”
— Juleigh Howard-Hobson – HWA, SFPA, Best New Weird Award Winner, 2025 SFPA Elgin Award Chair, multiple Rhysling nominee and author of the Elgin-Nominated Our Otherworld
“I have an intense fear of phobias, but I’m sure under Pixies masterful hand, this collection will showcase an epic proportion of Disturbia” — Laura Kester Duerrwaechter
“Pixie invites readers into a cabinet of fears both familiar and esoteric, transforming even the most obscure phobias into experiences that feel ominously real. Her vivid, immersive poetry lingers long after the final page, leaving readers to question whether any fear is truly irrational. Pixie’s Poems to Be Afraid Of is a haunting collection for the intrepid reader.”
— Jason O'Toole , author of The Strange Misgivings of the Sadly Gifted
“As a poet laureate and speculative poet, I am always delighted to discover collections that embrace the darker corners of the imagination. In Poems to Be Afraid Of, Pixie Bruner invites readers into a world of visceral fears, where phobias surrounding motherhood, pixies, social rejection, insects, and many other anxieties take on vivid and unsettling forms. These poems draw upon the classic traditions of horror, exploring the uncanny, the monstrous, and the things that linger in the shadows long after we turn away. Yet beneath the chill lies a deeper truth about the fears we carry and the stories we tell ourselves about them. Bruner’s poems are haunting, making this collection a rewarding read for anyone who loves horror poetry and dark speculative verse.”
— Wendy Van Camp, Anaheim Poet Laureate Emerita (2022-2024) and SFWA Poetry Committee Chair, Editor, Writing Coach, and Author
“If David Bowie, William Burroughs, and Dorothy Parker took some mighty powerful hallucinogens, it’s Pixie Bruner they would concoct into being through the greatest incantations—poetry. Pixie flays truths into a danse macabre, and then choreographs new works from those bones. Bones we all try to hide, but are within, nonetheless. “
—Colleen Anderson, Rhysling Award and SFPA Dwarf contest winner, and multiple nominee
“Like a runaway cyber truck, Pixie Bruner’s Poems to be Afraid Of stalked and bore down on me on every page. The poems pummeled me; I could not escape until I’d been roughed up by every single one, to the last terrifying image. Well into the midnight hours, I was forced to keep reading. Not safe, not safe at all.”
—Mary Turzillo, Elgin and Nebula winner
“Irreverent wit, impeccable timing, and flawless verse. Pixie wrings laughter from every grimace and makes a feast of our worst fears.”
— @Lilith Raven Rose, author of Bittersweet Empathy Lily Rose
“Pixie Bruner is a poet in a class all her own. She is a dream maker, powerfully moving, weaving myth, realities, humor and heartbreak into poetry and prose in her unique distinctive style. In this book, Poems to Be Afraid Of, she is a sorceress, leadingus through this legendary world of phobias. Her poems can go anywhere, from literary to fantasy, quiet observation to darkly playful. Some simple recollection of heartache. All told with the same sincerity of the soul. The poems are accompanied by Chroma catalogue poems which add a surprising twist. This book is truly a one of a kind. And it delves into a subject we are all fascinated by, phobias.”
- Sara Castaneda, Author Underdog Bet
“It’s in the grass, it’s in your throat, it’s coating every inch of the walls. Are you ready? Pixie Bruner’s Poems to Be Afraid Of is an exquisitely unflinching journey through all the things that send you screaming and still, you won’t want to look away from the lists and the questions and the raw, emotive heart of so much fear.”
—Felicia Martínez, Rhysling nominated poet and author of The Other Lives of Altagracia Sanchez
“In Poems to Be Afraid Of by Pixie Bruner we learn of “the Multiverse of me,” which is the blend of all the Pixies and their fears. Fears that some of us relate to. I’m the one who wrote the essay on arachnophobia, after all, in Mary Harris’s collection, Phobias, so Bruner’s book was a natural for me. But some of these fears I had no idea existed, such as “Arachibutyrophobia,” the fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth:
It hangs like a stalactite from my soft palate.
I am panicking at my impending death.
Choking hazard lights flash in my eyes,
No oxygen, those lights will dim in minutes.
I am drowning at the kitchen sink,
And anyone who’s ever felt possessed by the fear of the King in Yellow, or the return of the Decadent movement, will understand what’s happening in “Chroma Poem 1”:
Jaundice, Van Gogh’s room, those sunflowers,
the dandelion gnawing at the lawn,
its lion teeth tearing at my brain,
Uh, yeah. If any color is to be feared, it’s that one. But it’s not the only chroma-trauma poem in here, oh no. Anyone ever have the blues, for example…
So in her inimitable way, Bruner illuminates the fears we’re scared to even read about. Poetry, after all, can be the illuminator of all the things we don’t dare to feel, and poetry makes you feel in the way that prose just doesn’t. Consider Poems to Be Afraid Of an exorcism in a way. I’m tempted to call each poem a palate cleanser between the things that are dear to us and the things that we fear will kill us just by thinking about them. Now read that last clause again. What are you afraid of?”
—Denise Dumars, author of Animal Gnosis, Speaking Bones, Sheet Lightning, and other collections of disturbing poetry.
“Pixie Bruner’s Poems to Be Afraid Of gathers eerie scraps of fear and reimagines them into an unsettling collection where terror becomes the anchor, and what follows after it is the unknown. From the fairytale twists in “Mythconceptions” to the spiraling “Theater of the Absurd,” this collection traverses the ways fears mutate into a swarm of emotions and transcend the boxes we construct for them”
—Nico Martinez Nocito (he/they), Nebula and Rhysling finalist, SFFH writer and poet
“If you’re looking for the perfect collection of poems that speak of House Of Leaves vibes, then look no further.”
—Brian J. Smith, author of Dead River and Blood On The Sand
“Pixie Bruner’s Poems to be Afraid Of unwraps the bandages to pick at the scabs of trauma and anxiety, the poet digging through dust, through purple jacaranda trees, rewinding near-eidetic memories and confronting macaroni-art hoarding ghosts to peel back ‘the layers of dead skin from your person’. But there’s a strange catharsis in addressing our phobias, an unbuttoning, a birthing, or rebuilding that can only occur when our fears are laid bare. A rare collection that breaks bones and slurps through the marrow of phobia. Brutally insightful.”
—Lee Murray, Bram Stoker Award®-winning author of Tortured Willows
‘Pixie Bruner knows things, she knows things you haven’t considered thinking about, knows things you thought were impossible, things you’d hoped everyone had forgot’
- David Noone author Saint of the City, songwriter, and poet
#newbook #horrorbook #indieauthors #speculativepoetry #psychologicalhorror #darkpoetry #booktok #booklovers
