As a child I used to sneak out onto the roof of our house at night and look up at the night sky. Living on a secluded plot of land in a rural part of the state, I can remember hearing all kinds of sounds emanating from the darkness around me as I sat there: the howl of coyotes, the hooting of owls, and the occasional screech of a bobcat. The most otherworldly of these night sounds tended to be nothing more than the neighbors’ cattle, but part of me always wondered if something more frightening was lurking out in the darkness. This curiosity was not diminished by the handful of occasions during my childhood in which I awoke to hear the sound of my dad fetching his twelve-gauge to go out and confront a perceived threat in the darkness (i.e., racoons flipping lightswitches in the barn, his stallion trampling down gates with the force of a pickup truck).
It was with these incidents in mind that I dove into Cryptozarkia, Mark Spitzer’s collection of cryptid-related poems published by Cornerpost. Published in 2023, it would strain credulity to refer to the collection as new, but every so often we belatedly discover a piece of writing whose brilliance overcomes our desire for freshness. That was certainly the case here.
Spitzer’s verses explore a menagerie of Ozark legends: the Ozark howler, the Mexican crab tick, the hoop snake. Some of these are recent additions to the region’s mythical bestiary, such as the crab tick, which is a tick that is capable of clearing five quarts of blood from a human in just one hour. Others, meanwhile, blend native American folklore with early European settler tradition, such as the hoop snake, which “goes rolling at speeds / exceeding sixty miles per hour / before straightening out” and, according to legend, “skewering humans / with the deadly stinger / on its tail.”
Spitzer, who passed away before this book was published, investigated the origins of each of the creatures in his collection, exposing some as whole cloth hoaxes while leaving a bit of room for guarded curiosity in other cases. These investigations were not just relegated to the page. Spitzer floated rivers, boated lakes, and crawled through claustrophobic cave chambers to follow the threads of his mythical queries. By taking each legendary creature at face value, Spitzer is able to pose a profound question about the human imagination: what makes us believe in and spread these kinds of stories in the first place?
Some readers may wonder why Spitzer’s investigations are presented in verse rather than prose; it makes clear that despite the earnestness of his investigations, his true curiosity was centered around this question of human imagination. The lyrical quality of his writing and the philosophical reflections contained in the verse explain the use of this medium, such as, “it’s always eerie / crunching through the hush / of nothing rustling / in the brush.” Each poem in the collection really deserves to be read twice—once for the information it reveals and once for its quality as verse. If that doesn’t serve as an endorsement, I don’t know what will.
Mark Spitzer, 170 pages, Poetry/Folklore/Mythology/Nature, CornerpostPress, paperback (8by 8 inches), $15.95.
This article appeared in the January/February 2025 edition of Missouri Life.
