Beyond the Planet of the Vampires

Ulrich Baer was born in Georgia and grew up beneath Southern power plants. He received his MFA from Brown University in 2017. Among other books, he has a poetry book with Red Hen (Deer Black Out, 2024), a science fiction chapbook with Essay Press (At One End, 2020), and a full-length book with Apocalypse Party (Midwestern Infinity Doctrine, 2021). He has been included in journals such as FENCE, Baest, and Afternoon Visitor. He loves horses and lives in Paris, or anywhere.

"Readers up for the challenge will be rewarded with plentiful idiosyncratic word play, poetic turns of phrase, and haunting images." —Publishers Weekly"Think Paul Celan and Buck Rogers meet up with the Beowulf poet in Nosferatu’s castle where Dennis Cooper is watching the Rocky Horror Picture Show and you'll get some small sense of what goes down in Ulrich Baer’s excellent new novel. Wondrous, strange, disturbing and sexy, Beyond the Planet of the Vampires, where 'words drill the void edges' and 'bonfires fuse borders,' is a riotous tour-de-force." —Laird Hunt, author of Zorrie"'If god is immanence, then we are already consecrated’ Baer writes, in Beyond the Planet of the Vampires, but what forces lurk in that consecration. Cascades of language crash & thrum here, in fields of clover, in desert nights under streetlights, in distant cities, in ‘god’s profligate architecture,’ in the hard planetary materia, crystals, storms, in eroticism & violence, a deeply seeking phenomenological consciousness whirls about, wielding words as mutable lumps in the surging, seething elemental forces. Grief wheels like this, & seeks like this, ‘in inconsolable excess,’ on a worlded planet where the mysterious other is encountered, fucked, punches, & fades back into the roiling mass of forms. ‘The wound’ he writes, ‘thronged.’ Here, he has given us a testament of, for, from, & inside of the thronging." —Cody-Rose Clevidence, author of Aux Arc Trypt Ich