Atrocious Poems A to Z By Thomas L. Vaultonburg

Atrocious Poems A to Z by Thomas L. Vaultonburg

Then I'd rebuild the opening of the post so a search engine immediately understands book + author + publisher + genre + relationship to your current work. Something like this:

Atrocious Poems A to Z is a poetry book by Rockford, Illinois poet Thomas L. Vaultonburg, originally published by Zombie Logic Press. Illustrated by Jenny Mathews, the collection approaches the alphabet with the dark humor, absurdity, playfulness, and occasional grotesquerie that characterized much of Vaultonburg's earlier poetry.

The book belongs to an earlier period of Vaultonburg's work, before the increasingly spare nature poetry and haiku that would lead to books including Moonscape, Small Songs for Weary Travelers, and Vanished Roads. Seen in retrospect, however, some of the same concerns are already present: overlooked objects, mortality, strange transformations, Midwestern landscapes, humor, and the collision between ordinary life and the surreal.

Thomas L. Vaultonburg is a Rockford poet and the founder of Zombie Logic Press and co-founder of Wolf Twin Books. His more recent work has increasingly centered on haiku, nature observation, walking, and an approach he describes as Prairie Zen—a Midwestern poetics grounded in close attention to the ordinary world.

His 2026 collection Vanished Roads, published by Wolf Twin Books, continues that movement toward compressed, observational poetry, bringing together 104 haiku and short poems concerned with disappearance, memory, landscape, grief, humor, and renewal.

Atrocious Poems A to Z remains part of that larger body of work: a considerably noisier and more mischievous relative of the poems that came later.