The Pop-Up Book of Death is a new collection of vivid and startling poems from Chad Helder. These poems navigate a humorous and unsettling landscape where horror movies transgress the boundaries of the screen, sinister words strike out from books like trapdoor spiders, and true love extinguishes every apocalyptic flare-up. In this bizarre terrain, haunted by the dream harbinger of the white dog, Chad Helder offers a pastiche of childhood memory, dream journal, and surrealist fantasy, confronting the horrors of The Closet and the anxieties of The Apocalypse. Within the pages of the Pop-Up Book of Death, in which all of the pop-ups are metaphors likely to put out an eye, you'll discover a vampire paperboy delivering unwanted headlines, a neanderthal love affair across time and across the glass barrier of a museum diorama, a queer boy's encounter with the Satanic embodiment of his own homophobia, the coming out of a preacher's son in a haunted gay bar, and of course, the menacing and mysterious Pop-Up Book of Death itself.

Hansel and Gretel:

The witch contained the boy in frames,
the wall of monitors,
each like a scale in a serpent's armor.

The witch worked in a security guard disguise
for the massive sprawling department store.

He spied the boy and his mother as they entered his territory.
He could zoom in on the boy and freeze the frame;
he could erase the mother's presence.
The black orbs on the ceiling
that contained the cameras for the cannibal witch in his booth
sparkled like a multiplicity of spider eyes.
From the beginning,
the witch digitized the boy.

The boy separated from his mother,
lost in the forest of the department store
without bread crumbs to return to her.

The cannibal witch knew subtlety,
knew how to coax the boy into the back storage room,
the skill of the gingerbread house,
where the security guard revealed
the wolf beneath,
and he mummified the young Hansel in a plastic wrap machine
with the speed of a spider's
nimble spinnerets.

The witch kept the boy in a basement room
of his gothic old house
inherited from a dynasty
of industry and oppression.
He grunted a powerful spell that barred the escape of sound;
the boy's screams resounded within the enclosure,
but the spell funneled them away from neighbor's ears.
The witch decorated the basement cell with many dresses and mirrors.
He gave the boy fabrics and patterns and shears and a silver sewing machine,
and the numerous secret cameras beheld him
with multifaceted surveillance,
and the boy created a new identity in the mirrors:
the heroic girl
with the cunning to outwit the cannibal witch
and trick him into the fire
of his own damnation.

The cannibal witch kept the boy in the basement room for exactly one year.
Every day he stole a digital portrait
from the hours of footage of
dressmaking, of posing, and undressing.
On the first anniversary of the boy's captivity,
the witch brought a block of wood instead of the camera.

After gazing at the boy through the lens each day for 365 days,
the cannibal witch's hunger
slipped through the smallest hole like the octopus escape,
and the desire unfurled its tentacles
that reached and sucked
and constricted.

In the adjacent rooms of the basement,
the cannibal witch kept many shiny implements and machines.
He butchered the best pieces of the boy
and prepared him into savory sausages,
collecting all the bones
and boiling them clean in a soup,
arranging them
on the floor of a cellar grave
with a pink dress for adornment.

The witch satiated the ravenous cannibal hunger in his belly,
but only temporarily;
soon the tentacles of his hunger
branched forth again;
now he contended with the appetite of his eyes,
which grew ravenous
with the deprivation of sight.

The witch unleashed a weird spell
as he spilled the captured images of the boy
into the digital realm;
they multiplied and spread
like mosquitoes from stagnant water,
consumed by a multitude of hungry eyes.
Through the proliferation of the digital image,
the witch created a phantom of the boy,
as if each digital sequence carried enough of the boy's spirit
to piece him into a complete ghost
for the cannibal to view and control
with his gaze.

Something went wrong
as the witch summoned the boy's spirit
from the digital abyss;
the ghost transmogrified beyond the witch's will
into a Gretel,
born from the boy's fantasy in the mirror world,
an avenging Gretel,
a killer of witches,
a pusher into fiery ovens,
a phantom armed with the sewing shears.

As the cannibal witch finished every last morsel of the sausages,
Gretel attacked him
in the spider web of his dreams,
and he awoke
trapped in the ropes of his bed sheets,
but as a phantom
of no more substance
than ones and zeros,
she could not kill the cannibal witch.

The digital images multiplied and spread,
and with them a phantom
like the unseen paralyzing jellyfish
carried in by the surf;
whosoever finds the boy
with the bread crumbs of keywords
in the vast digital wilderness,
gazes at the forbidden images
on their computer screen
opens the portal for Gretel
to enter into their dreams
where they encounter the cold puncture of her sewing shears
and the fiery oven of her vengeance.

in certain slant of moonlight
ghostly sparkle more shiny than silver
but in the spotlight of nightmares
dried blood red rust of madness
vengeance

once upon a time
a cannibal pedophile
tucked in young Bartholomew
under shovelfuls of moist earth
where a million fern fronds beheld
the hideous moonlight deed

but something occupied Bartholomew's cranium like
a seed pod
the spectral fetus of the phantasm
which slumbered in Bartholomew's lobe
unfurled

then Bartholomew awoke
animated
but depleted
of mortal life

as Bartholomew crawled free of
muddy shallow womb
he found the blue jeans and hooded jacket
he wore on the abduction day
and the stained Gretel dress he wore
for the cannibal's camera

and something else

the wicked spiked legs
and finger-hole owl eyes
of the sewing shears
which the phantasm fastened on
as it ushered forth the
multifaceted thing from the phantasm dimension
the Scissor Swarm
governed only by the impetuous id
that buzzed like an angry wasp
in the mason jar of his mind

now
three-in-one
the undead boy
the spectral brain-bound phantasm
and the many-toothed
unspeakable thing
the Scissor Swarm

its many silver arms like wings
each finger-hole a mouth of alarm

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Pop-Up Book of Death Page Two
Origins of Burial

A Neanderthal corpse rises up from the page
(two edges of paper rub together to simulate a deathcough).

Pull the tab:

The corpse curls into the fetal position.
If the page is left open overnight,
moonlight will awaken the microscopic organisms
placed on this page at the factory.
In the morning, your child will discover the miracle of decomposition
(god’s erasure)
and the mystery implement of the Neanderthal’s death
(a bear’s tooth? an arrow head?) which is easily crafted into a necklace.
Lift the flaps to discover other artifacts used to accompany loved ones to the other world.

A Fun Activity:

Bury a friend in the fetal position.

Pop-Up Book of Death Page Three
Egyptian Head

The bandages slide away like worms to reveal the grinning head.
Pull the Nose Tab:

Learn the Egyptian secret of unraveling the brain with a hook through the nostril.
Learn the effects of moisture on corpses and the
(amazing)
quick rot of the floater.

A Fun Activity:

Monkey traps and the secret to shrunken heads.
Wear your heads like a necklace.

Pop-Up Book of Death Page Four
The Void

Don’t allow children under the age of ten to stare at this page unsupervised.

Pop-Up Book of Death Page Five
Wages of Sin

A scaffold rises off the page,
complete with dangling criminal on a string
and a mobile of circling vultures.

Blow:

and the vultures close in.

Pull the Tab:

The trap door releases.
The prisoner’s eyeballs and tongue pop out
(Warning: Choking Hazard for children under the age of three).
The bloodthirsty mob rises from the page
and shakes fists at the hapless soul.
Learn about loss of bladder control in the chair
and other gross jobs for Death Row janitors.

Pop-Up Book of Death Page Six
Martyrdom

The pyre rises from the page, complete with kindling (matches not included). A complete set of cut-out cardboard martyrs can be found in the back of the book. The platform is treated with the latest fire retardant material, so your child can re-use the platform again and again for martyr-burning fun (parental supervision recommended – keep away from curtains).

Pop-Up Book of Death Page Seven
Death and You

The mirror.

Finger face paints in shades of gray
line the side of the page.
Affix a spot of fungus to your face.
Tear the perforations to remove the paper glasses that
turn your eyes to holes.
Like a funhouse mirror,
the reader’s face distorts into pain and
regret.

Pull the Tab:

Worms wriggle out the reflection.

Refrain:

I glimpsed the sign in fire
where heat distortion clarified
the symmetry,
a web to snare an articulation
to unite the severed spinal cords.

The final sign,
a silk veil composed
by spinneret and orifice.

The network,
the burrow of the worm
in my mind,
a cocoon growing
enumeration
on the frequency
of the cold bone.