David Jalajel is an American poet whose work has appeared in a number of online and print journals, including Shampoo, Recursive Angel, experiential-experimental-literature, and Lynx. He is also the author of Moon Ghazals, published in 2009 by Beard of Bees Press.

Praise for Cthulhu on Lesbos:

The classical form of Cthulhu on Lesbos succeeds in generating a defamiliarized language and a chilling nightmarescape. An impressive addition to the Lovecraft tradition.

– Jack Morgan, author of The Biology of Horror: Gothic Literature and Film, Southern Illinois University Press, 2002.

Cthulhu on Lesbos is a remarkable instance of experimental poetry, as well as a notable addition to Lovecraftiana.  David Jalajel collages text selected from Lovecraft’s story “The Call of Cthulhu” into Sapphic stanzas that refract Lovecraft’s narrative through non-Euclidean syntax. Horrifying implications rush at the reader between the text’s prepositions and their vanished objects. In Lovecraft’s story, there is a tension between the narrator’s skepticism and his accepting the bizarre claims of the manuscripts he has found. In Jalajel’s Sapphics, there is a parallel tension between syntactical sense and the weird suggestions of the phrases cut and shuffled into a classical form.

– Gene Doty, poetry editor for Recursive Angel

David Jalajel’s Moon Ghazals are a sort of Magical Realist take on the Moon, populating it with a variety of familiar objects and attitudes. I thought of Stanislaw Lem while reading these poems; there’s a similar wit in them.

–The Ghazal Page