Deathmatch Poems, WorldCon Seattle 2025

[Note: Last week, at the World Science Fiction/Fantasy Convention (WorldCon) in Seattle, Rebecca Demarest hosted a boisterous session in the poetry track.  This was a Speculative Poetry Deathmatch featuring a series of prompts/challenges, with genres and key phrases supplied by the audience.  Five panelists and three randomly selected audience members competed in pairs through several elimination rounds, judged by volume of audience acclamation.  I arrived a couple minutes late and did not put my name in, but like the rest of the audience I responded to the prompts with my own little poems, which I’m presenting here.]

 

1.     Prompt: 4 lines/4 minutes; magical realism; energy drink

 

Your favorite energy drink:

Citrus bubbles full of fairies in the basketball court.

Wait for tomorrow, the children say:

No more free throws for you!

 

 

2.     Prompt: 5 lines/5 minutes; cyberpunk; hairless cats

 

Virtual punk cats,

Bald since last week’s security upgrade

Leave null lines of code

For hacking their litterbox.

Naughty kitties will have to learn Ghost Fortran on their own!

 

 

3.     Prompt: 7 lines/7 minutes; space opera; pickles

 

Cucumber pickle-shaped star cruisers

Span the stars, colonizing all worlds as they go.

Three hundred years later chip-shaped saucers

Start a light-years-spanning rebellion

Over fast food franchises:

Chicken wings or hamburgers?

Drowning 10,000 worlds in mustard and catsup dipping sauce.

Blurb notes for A. Pascual-Leone, 2026: Principles of Emotion Change

[Notes: (1) I get asked to write blurbs for forthcoming books, in exchange for getting to read an advance copy. It’s always a challenge to boil a book down to 2 to 3 sentences, and I often end up writing a couple different versions for the marketing folks to pick from, plus some of my other favorite bits. (2) Reference: Pascual-Leone, A. (2026). Principles of Emotion Change: What Works and When in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life.  APA.  Book details: Paperback; Publication date: November 2025; ISBN: 978-1-4338-3660-2; 656 pp; US$54.99]

 

Short blurbs:

Brilliant! Elegant, clear-thinking and highly practical at the same time. Provides the empirical and conceptual foundation for the next generation of Emotion-Focused Therapy theory and practice.

 

Lovely writing, highly quotable, chock full of concrete, wide-ranging practice suggestions with a range of compelling metaphors and entertaining case examples.

 

  

 

 

Longer blurb:

Serious EFT therapists and practitioners of related emotion-based approaches will want to read this book, because it provides a solid, clearly stated scientific foundation for five key kinds of emotion change processes. The author has produced a tour de force based on a rigorous, decade-long systematic review of a wide range of applied emotion research, producing a fresh look at the key therapeutic tasks such as empty chair work, grounding them historically and in the wider field of applied emotion research.

 

 

Other favorite bits:

 

Antonio has done us an enormous service by developing and putting forward a unified grounded theory of the specific emotion processes that drive change in psychotherapy and people’s lives more generally.

 

One of my favorite things about this book is the humility of the author: At the end of an enormous and masterful review, the client is the hero of the story, choosing the emotion change processes that make the most sense to them and using these to change themselves. This book then serves to help therapists support this process.

 

Favorite quote: “While the therapist chooses the intervention, only the client chooses the process” p. 45

 

 

Additional note: This book is due out a couple of months after the second edition of Elliott, Watson, Goldman & Greenberg. (2025). Learning Emotion-Focused Therapy: A Comprehensive Guide. It’s a great complement to Learning 2, essentially providing the basic science underpinning Learning 2, and maybe pushing its edges in places. Antonio has been working on this book for 12 years, and it’s massive, a real magnum opus!