Immortal Longings: a review of Vampire Verses, by LindaAnn LoSchiavo. Twisted Dreams Press. 2025.
The first thing that meets the eye is the cover art by Jennifer Horgan: a painting of a woman in a long while dress reclining in chair of a ruby red that complements the frame. In the book, striking black and white sketches by Giulia Massarin and Erin Caldwell complement the poems, Vampire Verses.
What attracts readers to vampires may be things that attract viewers to Bela Lugosi’s Dracula: the pale face, black cape, slicked-back hair, the intensity in his eyes. His exoticism, his mystery. Readers, frightened, do not turn away, but let themselves be taken in. The realm of the undead is cold and cozy. The vampire’s startling presence, the allure of the unknown, the pleasure of unique sensuality—LindaAnn LoSchiavo captures, and more, in poems sometimes humorous, sometimes unsettling, and always exacting, on the mark. LoSchiavo’s treatment of fixation, conflict, and a thirst for immortality individualize her Dracula; he’s an original.
Fixation takes two: an object and a perceiver of that object. Count Dracula (the object) piques the curiosity of the vintner’s daughter. In a ballroom, “His gaze penetrates/ Until she’s under his hypnotic sway.” Fixation involves surrender; he can’t help himself; neither can she, “both of them victims.” In “Oupire” she says, “I let/ the stranger usher me through the red moon’s mist …/ as if we’d both made a bargain/ under our shared sky.”
Why she surrenders is hinted at in the line, in “Biteology.” “He defied boring norms of nature.” Humor is threaded through these poems. One moment of dark humor comes when they are watching the movie A Nightmare on Elm Street. Freddy Kruger can’t compare to Dracula; to Freddy blood “was no more than splatters on the floor./ Each time an actress bled, we craved a taste.” “Craved” evokes their fixation.
Conflict is denoted in the oxymoron “living death.” Of course, LoSchiavo’s subject is not death, but the undead. Unlike the dead, vampires exist; unlike the living they exist in a timeless realm (although a vampire might give their age as 888, or younger older). Given their immortality, and gloom, the poem title “During Happy Hour at the Undead Lounge” is outrageously funny. There, the speaker meets a stranger who buys her a drink. A strong drink. She blacks out and, when she wakes, feels that she’s been in a dark cemetery, far from the soft lights of The Undead Lounge.
Part of a vampire’s unnatural condition is they can’t see their reflection; also, though immortal, they can’t roam in daylight; this inner conflict is revealed in the line “Daily duel with the dawn.” Needing blood they are up against a myriad of opposition, for one, people who’d drive a stake through their heart. “Immortality takes effort.”
One engaging conflict lies in the Megan sequence: “An Ideal Lost in Night Mists.” Its setting, a college dorm, signals a shift in tone. It has the allure of chapters from a detective novel, with characters: the speaker, her roommate Megan, and another, Annabelle, and a plot, and standard punctuation, only it’s not prose; but narrative poetry at its best. Not to give away too much, here’s a sampling:
Alone now, in bed, on edge, Megan hears a loose
floorboard creak, notices Annabelle’s closet door
ajar, as if something’s slipping through the in-
between, staking virgin space as if this was an
outpost of an empire about to be invaded.
LoSchiavo’s challenge is do something that’s never been done before. She succeeds in “An Ideal Lost in Night Mists, as in all the poems. The book is divided into two sections, and the second is titled “Tribute to Bram Stoker.” Even many lay people, “vampire outsiders,” know Stoker as the author of Dracula. “Echo Verse: On Walpurgis Night” is introduced by an epigram from Stoker’s “Dracula’s Guest.” LoSchiavo’s “Oupire” seems to be spoken in the voice of Carmilla, the speaker in the poem that precedes it.
The black carriage the vintner’s daughter sees; the “Eternal love he vowed” in “Villanelle: Defined by a Stygian Realm;” the “shape-shift into a bat” in “A Vampire Joins the Playboy Club;” the heart emojis in “Dating the Undead;” and the final poem, “Golden Shovel: Living in Death” evoke cognizance of vampire lore.
While each poem stands on its own, these poems are sequences inside a sequence; that is clearly the impression regarding both sections of the book. Little things mean a lot, as they should, with no word wasted, as it should be. The author plans and executes the plan; she delivers, taking readers into a world of language that is new, not derivative of other writings on vampires, but rather a present linked to the past. Her result is elegant, exacting poetry, a very rewarding read.
Vampire Verses by LindaAnn LoSchiavo
“Vampire Verses” explores the seductive mystique of the shadow sphere and savors the forbidden allure of encounters with the supernatural — illustrated by spooky full-page artwork.
For lovers of Gothic poetry and vampire lore, this collection captures what makes these immortals irresistible: their paradoxical existence where death becomes a gateway to living more intensely.
Peter Mladinic
Peter Mladinic’s most recent book of poems, The Whitestone Bridge, is available from Anxiety Press. An animal rights advocate, he lives in Hobbs, New Mexico.
My website is:
https://petermladinic.com and my Instagram handle is: @pmladinic.
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