Annotated Bibliographies

 

Reiff, AE. The JFK Order. Grand Canal, AZ: FLYWAY BOOKS, 2023, 2025.

This collection of 39 stories by AE Reiff, published by FLYWAY BOOKS, explores themes of  human-animal hybrids and future societies through allegorical and experimental prose. Notable stories include “Nabu! Nabu!,” featuring anthropomorphic roaches, and “Guapa Susan,” which examines oversized human figures in a surreal social context. All but one story, “Rehoboth Starr,” were previously published in literary journals. The 2023 and 2025 editions include added prefaces, enhancing the original compilation. Two stories, “Herbal Cures of Orc Tongue” and “Overflights from the Desk of Pedro Escadero,” were nominated for the Pushcart Prize by the editors of elimae and Ghoti Mag, respectively, reflecting recognition within the small press community. The Pushcart Prize, established in 1976 by Pushcart Press, honors outstanding works of poetry, short fiction, essays, or other literary forms published by small presses, with editors allowed to nominate up to six works annually from their publications. These nominations highlight the significance of this work in the independent publishing landscape, as the Pushcart Prize is a prestigious accolade that celebrates small press contributions, with over 2,000 writers and 600 presses honored since its inception. Additionally, “Orcapoi Review” was recommended by The Rumpus for its imaginative impact. The collection draws on diverse influences, including Native American folklore and speculative science in stories like “A Spiritual Tour of Grand Canyon” and “What a Dog Coyote Sings AI-AI-OO-OO and Other Visions of Iisaw,” offering a broad exploration of cultural and existential themes.

 

 

 

Reiff, AE. A Bloody Theory of Divine Light: Immortality and the Golden Age. [N.p.]: AE Reiff, 2022.

This speculative work by AE Reiff, self-published online in 2022 as his first full book to appear online following the chapbooks The True Light and Recon, comprises 20 essays, fictional narratives, and commentaries exploring mythology, immortality, and the “Golden Age” through religious, cultural, and scientific critique. It builds on Reiff’s earlier works, including A Calendar of Poems (1973), Native Texans: Selected Plants of the Edwards Plateau (1984), Taliesin Poems (1980), Planet Three: Help Send This Book into Space (1986), and A Poetical Reading of the Psalms of David, 1-41 (1986). Organized into sections such as “A Bloody Theory of Divine Light,” “Seed of the Woman,” “Monster War,” and “The Gilgamesh Tablets,” the text critiques the resurgence of pagan gods, scientific manipulation of identity (e.g., MK Ultra, genetic hybridization), and utopian Golden Age illusions, invoking biblical figures like Abraham and Jesus as counterpoints. The chapter “Loss of the Golden Age” draws on Reiff’s dissertation, Restorations of the Golden Age in New World Discoveries (UT-Austin, 1975), engaging with Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue to analyze New World mythological restoration. “Mythological Origins of America” examines Thomas Campion’s Latin poem Ad Thamesin, depicting America as Hades to counter Spanish colonial claims, reflecting Elizabethan satire. A 2022 Amazon review by Bill Weaver describes the work as an “intellectual sort of conspiracy,” likening its dense, avant-garde style to performance art and noting its alignment with systems theory, folklore, and conspiracy narratives (e.g., MK Ultra, Project Monarch), while critiquing its occasional “near incoherence” due to under-explained references. Weaver highlights Reiff’s defense of the human family and critique of modernity, aligning with Niklas Luhmann’s sociological framework. No Pushcart Prize nominations are documented for this work, unlike Reiff’s The JFK Order (Grand Canal, AZ: FLYWAY BOOKS, 2023, 2025), which earned nominations for “Herbal Cures of Orc Tongue” and “Overflights from the Desk of Pedro Escadero” in elimae and Ghoti Mag, respectively. The self-published, online format limits eligibility for traditional literary awards, but its speculative themes and experimental prose align with small press journals like Cafe Irreal or Antipodean SF, where Reiff’s earlier works appeared.

 

 

 

Reiff, AE. Red Head / A Reparation for Cruelty: Poems of the Unknown Soldier, Later Poems of Llyfr Taliesin. [N.p.]: Newfoundland Books, 2022, a poetry collection published by Newfoundland Books on September 9, 2022 (ISBN 978-0982342121), explores war, sacrifice, and redemption through the lens of the mythical bard Taliesin and the Unknown Soldier, weaving Welsh mythology with Christian spirituality. Structured into sections such as “The Unknown Soldier,” “Praise Poems,” “I Wisdom,” “Banquet of God,” “Nightingale,” and “A Song of the Wind,” the work employs elegies, sonnets, and Spenserian stanzas to evoke the battle of the Gododdin at Catraeth (c. 580), as in “Barley Feed” and “Red Head,” where bloodied fields yield spiritual harvests. “Nightingale” reimagines the Persephone myth in a romantic narrative, blending Platonic and biblical imagery, while “Banquet of God” prophesies ecological and moral collapse, citing Ezekiel 39 and Revelation 19. Inspired by Reiff’s travels in Snowdonia, Anglesey, and Caernarvonshire, the collection accompanies the lyrical themes of his chapbook The True Light That Lights (2020), following earlier works like A Calendar of Poems (1973), Taliesin Poems (1980), Native Texans: Selected Plants of the Edwards Plateau (1984), Planet Three: Help Send This Book into Space (1986), A Poetical Reading of the Psalms of David, 1-41 (1986), and Recon. Poems that appeared in journals such as The Texas Quarterly, Ygdrasil: A Journal of the Poetic Arts, Awhile, and Penny’s Poetry Blog, reflecting Reiff’s small press presence. A back cover review by Ruth P. M. Lehmann, author of An Introduction to Old Irish and Beowulf: An Imitative Translation, praises Reiff’s “real feel for the music of words, great variety of mood, voice, and form,” noting his “daring” use of Provençal schemes and ability to “ring many bells, waken many thoughts,” calling it “truly excellent work.” A 2022 Amazon review by Bill Weaver of Reiff’s A Bloody Theory of Divine Light (2022) similarly lauds his “magical, completely mad” style, suggesting a shared avant-garde intensity. Reiff’s The JFK Order (Grand Canal, AZ: FLYWAY BOOKS, 2023, 2025), earned nominations for “Herbal Cures of Orc Tongue” and “Overflights from the Desk of Pedro Escadero” in elimae and Ghoti Mag. Published as an e-book by Newfoundland Books (1.7 MB, screen reader supported), Red Head aligns with Reiff’s experimental ethos, appealing to readers. Reiff’s retro-cognition of the Welsh Tract in Bala-Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, and its Quaker heritage, enriches the work’s Cymric cultural resonance.

 

 

Hapax Legomen, copyrighted by AE Reiff for 2023 and 2025, indicating potential updates or future editions, features an image derived from the Chandra X-ray MSH 15-52, depicting a hand-like structure with a magnetic field map from the X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE), showcasing lower and higher-energy X-rays and a field map of the "bones" of fingers extending toward low-energy X-ray clouds. The title, Hapax Legomen refers to words or phrases occurring only once in a text, a concept central to the work’s exploration of unique linguistic and conceptual expressions, coined as “legomen” to signify ekphrastic descriptions of singular phenomena.

This interdisciplinary text integrates philosophy, mythology, history, speculative narrative, and cultural critique, organized into sections titled Centaur, Rhinoceros, Oracle, Stone, Democracy, Taurobolium, Seattle, Katabole, and Postscripts. These sections form a complex narrative including Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language (Philosophical Investigations and On Certainty), Dante Alighieri’s Inferno (particularly the Malebolge), Hieronymus Bosch’s surreal and grotesque imagery, and biblical texts such as Isaiah, Revelation, and the Book of Enoch. Through ekphrasis, the text vividly describes visual phenomena—a centaur transforming before the observer’s eyes, a rhinoceros running across a piano, a ceramic Democracy exploding in a kiln, and a Taurobolium shaped as a flattened American state—while connecting these to historical, political, and technological contexts.

The work opens with a quote from Aldous Huxley’s Complete Essays, Vol. II: 1926-1929, “Facts do not cease because they are ignored,” framing its challenge to conventional perceptions of reality. It explores the dissolution of boundaries between human and beast, reality and myth, and physical and digital realms through dense, poetic prose and layered metaphors. Key themes include the transformation of political structures into living, mutating organisms (e.g., centaurs as symbols of algorithmic governance), the destabilization of empirical certainty (e.g., Wittgenstein’s rhinoceros paradox), and the reconfiguration of human consciousness through technology (e.g., AI, CRISPR, Palantir). Specific references include the 2016 Kaikoura Earthquake in New Zealand, Buzz Aldrin’s tweet about an Antarctic “evil,” the Arab Spring as a metaphorical kiln explosion, and speculative conspiracies involving Antarctica and political figures like John Kerry and Anthony Weiner.

 

The narrative constructs a recursive cosmology where myth becomes infrastructure, notably in depicting Seattle as a digital empire analogous to Dante’s Satanic Florence, with Amazon’s frequency weapon experiments symbolizing modern control mechanisms. The concept of katabole—a casting down or rupture—underscores a narrative of memory, myth, and time collapsing, with the “Name Above Every Name” presented as a redemptive force against a counterfeit reality. The text engages with Ovid’s mythological transformations, Goya’s surreal visions, Blake’s prophetic poetry, and Kafka’s allegorical narratives to critique genetic manipulation, geopolitical collapse, and the fusion of human and machine. Alternating between prophetic rhetoric, surreal imagery, and satirical commentary, mythic events question linguistic stability and the nature of reality.

 

The Postscripts section synthesizes these ideas, framing the centaur, rhinoceros, and oracle as facets of a fractured world order where language and perception break under the weight of technological and mythological transformations. The work positions itself as a mythic transmission, not merely predicting but unveiling a reality where traditional distinctions—between human and beast, organic and synthetic, past and future—dissolve, leaving a landscape of singular expressions and fractured meanings.