MAGPIES & TIGERS, Misha Nogha, Wordcraft of Oregon, LLC: Original trade paperback, $10, black ink/colored coverstock, perfectbound, 5.5 X 8.5, 84 pgs. ISBN: 978-1-877655-49-4, 1-877655-49-X, LCN: 2007930088 Cover art by Jessica Soo Hyun Ni, Cover design by Katherine James, Inside digital art by Michael Chocholak

"Beginning with Jessica Soo Hyun Ni's excellent cover art of  four mirror image squares of tiger eye becoming bird, becoming quill pen, Misha Nogha's third book of poetry, Magpies & Tigers, is an elegant adventure in perspective.  These unexpected poems and short prose pieces embrace Norse and Northwestern Native American mythologies, mounting them on a pony headed breakneck, crazy fast across a meadow of the mind.  Skipping between cultures, she ties up her pony on Yggdrasil, the Norse tree of life, sips from a cup of fate given to her by the Norns, meets Baba Yaga on the Res, and Death down at the general store.  Nogha, whose vocations include musician, minister, and farmer, writes poems that are as sophisticated, challenging and complicated as her life.  Her understanding of animals is both intimate and totemic, her inner animal-self revealed through the creatures she describes.  "Magpies" the first poem of the book begins, "A golden horse neck arced into a great question mark/ Drew my eye and tipped it into the water trough/ Where I saw a magpie oaring the water with his wet oreo wings."  Though her spirit flies with the magpie and bounds with the pony, it is the bear that brings forth her inner shaman.  In "Dreaming Toonarsuk"  Nogha writes   "... and out of the sea comes Toonarsuk/ shaggy beribboned bear of blue glacier/ He wears a necklace of labradorite/ which are cubes of aurora he cut with his claws/in order to woo the shaman" .    Stones are powerful iconic images.  Sometimes their color defines an intangible quality for a living creature.  A "Dragonfly" is "A fierce water tiger of graphite feldspar" and the poet describes herself "Shimmering in the cool glow of selenite I was the deer dance." "The Silence of Stones" begins "Any caster of stones can tell you that silence is deafening./  In between crystalloblastic clacks of green stone and skarn/ the grinding of granite in the glaciers/ basalt boulders booming and yodeling on riverbottoms/ the hiss of ruby glow Grandfathers in sweat lodges."  Nogha's imagery is beautiful, redolent with mythological images.  Her poem "Fire and Ice" begins "Fire agate, opalescent bubbles in snowy matrix/ A dragon slumbers in the stone/ Chatoyant  red blue green yellow/ A dizzying dive into the secret fires/ A journey to the center of the earth."  Nogha is one who looks closely and describes well, adeptly using the vocabulary of science to describe the things of the heart.  In "Shapeshifter Blues" she writes:  "My heart is a volcanic glass/ pitted with conchoidal fractures/ I measure the weight of it in my hand and send it skipping." Unsurprising in one whose love for nature rises from the very center of the earth, there is a sharp, angry edge for those who would defile the natural beauty of of the world.  In her "Jaguar Moon" one of the most chilling and provocative poems in the volume, a computer game like Amazon Trail blurs into magical realism where a demi-godlike jaguar warns, "Adios Corporate Consumosaurs! I emailed your memento mori/ when I sent your programmers to picnic/ in the nanoforest"  ... "as the jungle juice runs down your chins/ while you drink it fresh in your mourning cups /  Burn the jungle and burn me/ I lap the red river at your virtual threshold."  Above all, these are powerful conjure poems, some of the best speculative work I have read this year." - Sandra Lindow, Star*Line “Misha Nogha’s poetry is like the good parts of life—and the good parts of life are often the most dangerous parts, if you’re paying attention. Most people are uneasily aware they’re gradually losing touch with something vital—Misha’s poetry will put you back in touch with that vitality.” - John Shirley, The Other End and Living Shadows “Misha Nogha knows not only the animal without but the animal within, and her words sing with this mystery.” - Annette Curtis Klaus, Blood and Chocolate and The Silver Kiss “Misha Nogha’s writings are a kaleidoscope of haunting images. As one poem says, “all realities are spoken here.” Small flashes of color reveal the wild immanence of nature; the image of a trotting wind-horse calls up the wideness of the world. Traveling territories seen and unseen, this poetry by a postmodern metaphysician speaks to readers in discordia concours of spectacular wordplay.” - Carol McGuirk, Florida Atlantic University, Co-Editor of Science Fiction Studies “A true shaman of the written word, Misha Nogha reminds us of our true human creature selves and our natural heritage through vibrant language, signaling a hyper-reality woven from dreamstates, mythical places, and animal avatars.” - Richard Truhlar, The Hollow and Parisian Novels Purchase at Wordcraft of Oregon

Morrigan - cover and art by Ferret , forward by Brian Aldiss, afterword by James Blaylock, art by Ferret.

"Silicon and cobalt fibers stretched a web of shining strands across his face and hands. He stood on the suspension bridge near Gaia. The winds in the wire warned in a steel cathedral sonata. He leaned over the cold rail, his hands twitching in vertigo and distress. He was next to no one here. A river of chemicals, effluvium and strange mailed fishes ran below. Molten ripples caught the fallen sun in peaks of oily copper. A storm of brown clouds and cold winds was rolling up the river."

Wordcraft - cover by Joey Zone ,forward by John Shirley, afterword by James Blaylock. Purchase at Wordcraft of Oregon or Amazon.com

Winner of the 1990 ReaderCon Award and finalist for the Arthur C Clarke Award.

"Misha's Red Spider White Web is, quite simply, everything cyberpunk should have been but wasn't, everything contemporary techno-dystopias should be but aren't. Instead of middle-class white men struggling with their love-hate relationships with dangerous but beautiful cybertoys, Misha offers society's most disenfranchised victims struggling for survival against the technotopic juggernaut. Instead of cyberpunk's typical anti-heroic misogynist-nerd, she gives us a feral female artist struggling to create something meaningful and lasting in a world established to destroy and dispose of her. The book is bleak, intense, and more accurate in its critique of contemporary U.S. culture's cruelty and ignorance than any book I have ever read." - Dr. Elyce Helford, Editor/Author, Enterprise Zones

"Misha's importance and distinctiveness are beginning to be noticed, there's beginning to be some kind of rip-tide here that will soon become a wave of recognition for a book that the world is beginning to catch up to... We weren't ready before. We'd better be ready now. Because it's the 21st century, any minute now, and that means that Misha's time has come. In more ways than one." - John Shirley

"We belong to an age where apocalypse is our daily bread, coffee's black, and we know we're part of the abyss. Red Spider White Web is right on target in conveying that understanding. It splinters in the mind... the underworld of the century's imaginings." - Brian Aldiss

"Red Spider White Web is startlingly visual... Its pages reveal a series of starkley painted images that go to work on your mind like the pictures on a tarot deck." - James Blaylock

"Imagine Arthur Rimbaud writing cyberpunk and you'll have some idea of what to expect. Misha plunges you into a nightmare near future without explanation, without warning. If you're looking for escapism, this is not the book for you." - Henry W. Targowski

"Visceral, unrelenting, and achingly lyrical, Red Spider, White Web is arguably the greatest cyberpunk novel ever written. At the same time, calling this novel "cyberpunk" doesn't quite do it justice. As with any work that transcends categorization, one of the ways it achieves this high level of quality is through unpacking and, when necessary, destroying the very tropes that buoy the more traditional cyberpunk novel... Reading this novel is like driving across a burning bridge — there is little time to breathe, and yet once on the other side, you realize you're never going to forget the experience." - Alan DeNiro

""The writing is a wonderful mix of fragility and violence, kind of a cross between Janet Frame and William S. Burroughs." - Craig L. Gidney

you can listen to the complete soundtrack to Red Spider White Web by Michael Chocholak here (and page down)

"It is raining sand and dirt. It slithers down in truckloads and flows around his feet, splattering his shoes and his gray slacks and the hem of his duster. The red bricks of the station platform spit at him as he leans forward to catch sight of the connection. His leather bags heel at his feet like two black lizards. He grabs their collars and drags them hissing across the gritty floor of the station." - from Chippoke Na Gomi

art by Ferret

"Her prose flashes knifelike or glows cooly depending on what kind of fire she wants to emit." - Michael Bishop "Six different people called in wolverine sightings... There were a couple of what I would call hot leads up in the Cove area." - Bob Mason in The Observer

"Finding the blue tail lizard, blackened by the sun and impaled on the barbed wire, we take it tenderly into our mouths. We roll the dried salt flesh on our tongues. Our white teeth crunch the tiny bones. Some shrike has left this for us. His strident call echoes in our ears. The tiny skull catches in our teeth. Our throats open for the wail. We wail for the blue water falling on our faces. The scenery blows away like a reptilian skin. Another summer sheds. It's the ochre sky we watch for. The khaki wheat beneath our feet." - from Walk The Red Road

"Misha's writing sounds like barbed wire being dragged across a raft of hydroelectric wire." - Conger Beasley, Jr. "As far as I know Misha wrote the first cyberpunk poetry." - John Shirley "The prose poem Walk The Red Road is great stuff and deserves to be read aloud. It compares quite favorably to The Walls Of Emerald by Li Chiang Yen, a Chinese poet of the late Tang period." - Brian Aldiss

cover by Richard Schindler

Aho! "As a layman I wasn't quite familiar with new breakthroughs in RNA/DNA manipulation not to mention Ihoka's highly technical jargon laced with esoteric medical terminology. However, with Misha's testimonials as well as those of other Ihoka patients I began to piece together a rather appalling picture of what Ihoka was driving at. His controversial and amoral uses of gene splicing seemed to suggest a Brave New Moreauvian nightmare". --Mary Denning (in Science Fiction Eye , Issue 13, Spring 1994).

Mp3s of In the Blood, Jaguar Moon, Kwahu, Butoh and Rage Render with Michael Chocholak,and Syrinx with Conrad Schnitzler, Kashira with Richard Truhlar , and the complete live performance with Jonathan Golove at SUNY in Buffalo NY in December, 2002 at Soundclick . Free music - no registration required.

Seven short incantations.

The Stone of Mystery from Magpies and Tigers

Jaguar Moon from Magpies and Tigers

Walk the Red Road from Prayers of Steel

The Animal Who Eats Winter from Ke-Qua-Hawk-As

Zen Zen from Ke-Qua-Hawk-As

The Carnelian Cat from Magpies & Tigers

Black Cat Blues from Magpies & Tigers

A selection of expressions from Prayers of Steel and Red Spider White Web

Webpage and Music by Badger r