Today on the site we’ve got a gorgeous new cover, this time for Birthing Orion by Dax Murray, which is a queer (f/f) space fantasy poetry collection releasing on October 9! Here’s a little more info on the book:

The relationship between two goddesses, one the embodiment of a galactic creation and the other of cosmic destruction, is tempestuous at best. They create and they destroy and then they do it all over again. Seya and Mia use their divine magic to make pulsars and nebula, to set planets spinning around stars and bind a galaxy together with a central black hole.

But when one of Seya’s favorite stars goes missing, she blames Mia. What was once a symbiotic cycle of life and death becomes a game of broken hearts and promises betrayed. These tensions and insecurities are explored in sonnets and villanelles; the arc of their love tracked in meter and verse. These poems touch on queer love, betrayal, trust, acceptance, and forgiveness cast against a backdrop of stardust and celestial detritus.

And here’s the beautiful cover, designed by Merilliza Chan!

But wait, there’s more! Excerpt below!

Proto

We were denser than some of the rest,
we accumulated, we shared gravity –
we were many atoms all compressed.
We collapsed into stars: majesty.

But we burned too brightly, too fast;
we were gone before we could even start.
It was all too good to endlessly last,
but we continued, rather than depart.

Collapsing, dying, globular cluster
and rotating disk; attracting more.
We were not lackluster
repeating all that had happened before

gas, dust and dark matter: a protogalactic cloud
we wore our newness as a shroud

Binary

I made them for you,
they share a common center

just like me and you
two stars, one orbit

always so close
to each other

I had not considered
that these twin stars

would only touch each other when they explode

perhaps this was not the romantic gift I envisioned for you

Journey

I could never figure out if we came
before Time. I could never figure out
how to quantify or count, there was no
unit of measurement that I could find

to calculate how long I spent breathing
you in, vibrating so fast in hopes that
I might cease to be me, and start to be
you. No longer two goddesses; but one

essence. One force on a journey beyond
these boundless stars, so true and deep a bond.

Stars

You told it to collapse
so it did

I told it to churn
hydrogen into helium

we held it between us,
hot and radiative

convective heat transfer
me to you

we made it dense, highly pressurized
to keep it from collapsing further

you and I, we made the stars

Preorder Birthing Orion here!

Dax Murray is a software engineer by day but fights demons writes queer fantasy and science fiction by moonlight. Dax writes worlds where being queer is not remarkable, and futures are held in the hands of the many instead of the few. Dax can often be found listening to the same seven songs on repeat, watching Revolutionary Girl Utena, reading Howl’s Moving Castle (again), or playing Rachmoninoff on feir flute. Dax is owned by three cats, two ball pythons, and one Brazilian rainbow boa. Dax studied political science, music, and creative writing at Allegheny College in Meadville, PA. Fey currently resides in Washington, DC with feir spouse. You can find them on the web at daxmurray.com, on Twitter @DaxAeterna, or sign up for feir newsletter.