Tortured Willows: Bent. Bowed. Unbroken.

The willow is femininity, desire, death. Rebirth. With its ability to grow from a single broken branch, it is the living embodiment of immortality. It is the yin that wards off malevolent spirits. It is both revered and shunned.

In Tortured Willows, four Southeast Asian women writers of horror expand on the exploration of otherness begun with the Bram Stoker Award-winning anthology Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women.

Like the willow, women have bent and bowed under the expectations and duty heaped upon them. Like the willow, they endure and refuse to break.

With exquisite poetry, Christina Sng, Angela Yuriko Smith, Lee Murray, and Geneve Flynn invite you to sit beneath the tortured willow’s gravid branches and listen to the uneasy shiver of its leaves.

Christina Sng is the three-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A Collection of Nightmares (2017), A Collection of Dreamscapes (2020), Tortured Willows (2021), Elgin Award runner-up Astropoetry (2017), Elgin Award nominee An Assortment of Sky Things (2016), and haiku chapbooks A Constellation of Songs (2016) and Catku (2016). Her book of speculative haiku and short poems The Gravity of Existence is slated for December 2022.

 

Angela Yuriko Smith is a third-generation Shimanchu-American and award-winning poet, author, and publisher with 20+ years of experience as a professional writer in nonfiction. Publisher of Space & Time magazine (est. 1966), a two-time Bram Stoker Awards® Winner, and HWA Mentor of the Year for 2020, find her at angelaysmith.com.

 

Lee Murray is an author, editor, poet, and screenwriter of speculative fiction and horror from Aotearoa-New Zealand. A USA Today Bestselling author and four-time Bram Stoker Award winner, she is her country's only recipient of the Shirley Jackson Award for psychological horror. She lives in the sunny Bay of Plenty with her well-behaved family and a naughty dog.

 

Geneve Flynn is an award-winning speculative fiction editor and author.

She co-edited Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women with celebrated New Zealand author and editor Lee Murray. The anthology won the 2020 Bram Stoker Award® and 2020 Shirley Jackson Award. It also shortlisted for the British Fantasy, Aurealis, and Australian Shadows awards. Black Cranes is listed on Tor Nightfire’s Works of Feminist Horror and Locus magazine’s 2020 Recommended Reading List.

Geneve loves tales that unsettle, all things writerly, and B-grade action movies. If that sounds like you, check out her website at www.geneveflynn.com.au.

Publisher: Yuriko Publishing (October 16, 2021)
Length: 188 pages
ISBN13: 

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Tortured Willows: Bent. Bowed. Unbroken.

By Christina Sng, Angela Yuriko Smith, Lee Murray and Geneve Flynn

Yuriko Publishing | Trade Paperback, 188 pages | October 2021

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