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Stephanie M. Wytovich
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Mourning Jewelry Kindle Edition

by Stephanie Wytovich (Author), Steven Archer (Illustrator) Format: Kindle Edition
4.1 out of 5 stars 15 ratings
Mourning is the new black…

The tradition of Victorian mourning jewelry began with Queen Victoria after the death of her husband, Prince Albert. Without photography, mementos of personal remembrance were used to honor the dead so that their loved ones could commemorate their memory and keep their spirits close. Ashes were placed within rings, and necklaces were made out of hair, and the concept of death photography, small portraitures of the deceased, were often encased behind glass. Mourning jewelry became a fashion statement as much as a way to cope with grief, and as their pain evolved over the years, so did their jewelry.

But what about the sadness and the memories that they kept close to them at all times? The death-day visions and the reoccurring nightmares? Wytovich explores the horror that breeds inside of the lockets, the quiet terror that hides in the center of the rings. Her collection shows that mourning isn’t a temporary state of being, but rather a permanent sickness, an encompassing disease. Her women are alive and dead, lovers and ghosts. They live in worlds that we cannot see, but that we can feel at midnight, that we can explore at three a.m.

Wytovich shows us that there are hearts to shadows and pulses beneath the grave. To her, Mourning Jewelry isn’t something that you wear around your neck. It’s not fashion or a trend. It’s something that you carry inside of you, something that no matter how much it screams, that you can just can’t seem to let out.
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  1. Print length
    123 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publication date
    May 6, 2014
  4. File size
    334 KB
  5. Page Flip
    Enabled
  6. Word Wise
    Not Enabled
  7. Enhanced typesetting
    Enabled
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Stephanie M. Wytovich is the Poetry Editor for Raw Dog Screaming Press, a book reviewer for Nameless Magazine, and a well-known coffee addict. She is a member of the Science Fiction Poetry Association and a graduate from Seton Hill University's MFA program for Writing Popular Fiction. Her Bram Stoker nominated poetry collection, HYSTERIA, can be found at rawdogscreaming.com. Follow Wytovich at stephaniewytovich.blogspot.com and on twitter @JustAfterSunset.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00K6ITCUA
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Raw Dog Screaming Press (May 6, 2014)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ May 6, 2014
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 334 KB
  • Simultaneous device usage ‏ : ‎ Unlimited
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 123 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.1 out of 5 stars 15 ratings

About the author

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Stephanie M. Wytovich

Stephanie M. Wytovich

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Stephanie M. Wytovich is an American poet, novelist, and essayist. Her work has been showcased in numerous magazines and anthologies such as Weird Tales, Nightmare Magazine, Southwest Review, Year's Best Hardcore Horror: Volume 2, The Best Horror of the Year: Volume 8, as well as many others.

Wytovich is the Poetry Editor for Raw Dog Screaming Press, an adjunct at Western Connecticut State University, Southern New Hampshire University, and Point Park University, and a mentor with Crystal Lake Publishing. She is a recipient of the 2021 Ladies of Horror Fiction Writers Grant and has received the Rocky Wood Memorial Scholarship for non-fiction writing.

Wytovich is a member of the Science Fiction Poetry Association, an active member of the Horror Writers Association, and a graduate of Seton Hill University’s MFA program for Writing Popular Fiction. Her Bram Stoker Award-winning poetry collection, Brothel, earned a home with Raw Dog Screaming Press alongside Hysteria: A Collection of Madness, Mourning Jewelry, An Exorcism of Angels, Sheet Music to My Acoustic Nightmare, and most recently, The Apocalyptic Mannequin. Her debut novel, The Eighth, is published with Dark Regions Press.

Follow Wytovich at http://stephaniewytovich.blogspot.com/ and on Twitter and Instagram @SWytovich​ and @thehauntedbookshelf. You can also find her essays, nonfiction, and class offerings on LitReactor.

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4.1 out of 5 stars
15 global ratings

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Top reviews from the United States

  • Sonora
    4.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful, melancholy collection
    Reviewed in the United States on April 10, 2019
    Verified Purchase
    This is a beautiful collection of dark poetry, mostly about love, death, and the intersection of the two. My favorite was "Untitled." I also liked "Asphyxiation." Definitely give this a read if you like the poetic side of all things macabre.
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  • Amazon Customer
    5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
    Reviewed in the United States on October 10, 2016
    Verified Purchase
    Great book!
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  • Sydney Leigh
    5.0 out of 5 stars Mourning is the New Black...
    Reviewed in the United States on June 23, 2015
    This review appears in Issue 15 of Shroud Magazine.

    During the Victorian era, people placed relics of the dead—often hair, teeth, and ashes—inside pieces of jewelry in order to keep their loved ones close. It is within the historical context of this macabre sentiment that Stephanie M. Wytovich’s new collection of poetry is set: “the concept of death photography, small portraitures of the deceased.” But as usual, this dark poetess traverses beyond the facets of the already grim backdrop of her theme and injects herself deeper: into the pain, the ash, the mourning itself—“the horror that breeds inside of the lockets”—into the very graves where the loved, and unloved, lie.

    Not unlike the trend itself, and the ways in which people have come to cope with death and grief over time, Wytovich has evolved as a writer. Her voice strikes noirish notes in “A Match Made by the Devil,” and her use of line breaks in “Airless” to mimic the title belies her craft as a learned poet. She infuses morbid humor in pieces such as "Dare I Keep the Body."

    Some of my favorite imagery appears in “Ballet of Knives,” where her voice comes across as unflinchingly confident—Wytovich often blurs the line between poetry and storytelling, and this story is told particularly well:
    “The knives were her people now, those long, silver sticks of / metal that dove through the air and sliced failure like a practiced / balancoire.”

    “Blackness” reads like the swan song of the collection, a perfect serenade to infinite, inescapable sadness—“I cringed at the minor-key / siren song it wailed in the / ink-spattered sky, poisoning / my eardrums with an inviting / brutality that blanketed / me in suffocation and / stabbed at my heart song”—but it was only the sixth poem of over a hundred, and since the collection is ordered alphabetically by title, its beautiful, haunting language and musings on the vast depths of grief seem to come too soon.

    Wytovich slips easily between two guises throughout: in one, her voice is cold, calculated, evil—

    "...I don't pretend
    that I belong here—that I'm something other
    than what I am—but I spread my wings
    and stretch out my claws, the Devil's grin
    on an angel's face...
    ...I don't pretend
    that I belong here—that I'm something other
    than what I am—but I eat men
    and torture hearts until they break, wait until
    they peel off their flesh to get away
    from my touch.

    And then I use their femurs like toothpicks,
    crack open their pallor shells
    and suck out the marrow like
    Bergamot tea."
    (from "Calcium")

    —and in the other, soft, vulnerable, and often victimized.
    "...I would walk journeys to calm the storm in your eyes...clear mountains and swim rivers to be with you...scale time, fight age, and battle death if you wanted me to ascend to love..." ("Falling, Rising into Love")

    In between, she douses us in voodoo, vampires, widows feigning grief; self-cutting, witchcraft, murder, magic, madness, mayhem, and things that don’t have names. Personal favorites include "Fireflies Dance for the Souls of Heroes," "Free My Soul," "The Night's Lover," "The Primrose Path," "There are Voices in the Wind," and "Vines are in Her Wardrobe."

    The title piece contains some undeniably memorable imagery; to say Wytovich is gifted is surely an understatement. Her muse is lavishly generous. If I had one critique, it would be to strip some of the longer prose pieces like "Corpse Flower” down and allow the striking visuals she creates with her poetry do the telling, as that’s where the real magic happens. Excellent collection—highly recommended.
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  • Char
    5.0 out of 5 stars A Dark and Stormy Night
    Reviewed in the United States on December 19, 2018
    4.5/5 stars!

    This poetry collection, read to me by Lesley Ann Fogle, was like a dark and stormy night, but inside my brain.

    Relentlessly dark and beautifully wrought, this volume speaks to the pain of being a woman, the pain of being done wrong by men, the joy in paying those wrongs back, (in spades), and a lot more.

    "Yes, suffocation would be a blessing from a world where each breath I take reminds me that I'm alone. That the life I lived was a lie, and that the person that I loved was nothing more than a foul gust of air that moved through a hollow woman."

    My favorites were SET THE WORLD ON FIRE, and XEROX HIS DEATH CERTIFICATE.

    I'm discovering that it's difficult to review a poetry collection such as this. While trying to impart the depth of feeling and emotion evoked by these dark words and ideas, I find myself consistently coming up short. This is the third time I've tried to write this review and this time I'm just going to let my words stand.

    If you like poetry, (hell, even if you don't), this collection is worth your time. Take it slow as I did, or race through it all at once-either way you're going to be affected by the experience. What exactly will that effect will be? I suspect it will be a highly individual-type thing, but for me? The experience was wonderful and I know I'll be revisiting MOURNING JEWELRY in the future.

    Highly recommended!

    *I received the audio of this book free from the author, in exchange for my honest feedback. This is it.*
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  • Clint Collins
    5.0 out of 5 stars The Wonderful "Blood Diamonds" of "Mourning Jewelry"
    Reviewed in the United States on June 30, 2015
    "Mourning Jewelry" is a sweetly disturbing collection of dark poetry's "blood diamonds," lovely gems created by the tortured souls Ms. Wytovich brings to life. Good poetry like this haunts you, so do not read them at night, as they will come for you in your dreams, as they must. There are wonderfully striking images in "Mourning Jewelry" that stay with you long afterwards. Some stirringly erotic like "It Was Hunger," in which the "wet diamond of her femininity" is explored by a lover and the regret of the loss of innocence is strikingly depicted in "Midnight Confessions of an Ex-Virgin." The poem "Mourning Jewelry" itself must be read to find how the bullet used to kill a lover becomes a clever adornment. "Sylvia" is a fascinating prose poem of a woman's love affair with Sorrow and Pain and "The Primrose Path" gives us new insights into the drowned Ophelia, flowers "sutured" within her hair. After reading "Urns Make Me Drunk," you will never look at martinis the same way again and "Xerox His Death Certificate" will make you laugh out loud. "Zodiac Machine" is the premise for a great horror novel and I hope Ms. Wytovich begins writing it. The above were a few of my favorites, but "Mourning Jewelry" darkly glitters on every page. Treat yourself to some of these poetic jewels--but just read them before the sun goes down.
    One person found this helpful
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  • H. Miller
    5.0 out of 5 stars Dark Mistress of Horror Poetry
    Reviewed in the United States on October 27, 2015
    Stephanie Wytovich proves in Mourning Jewelry that she is the dark mistress of horror poetry. This skillful and moody follow-up to Hysteria brings a brand new theme and a new tone to Stephanie's work. She continues to be edgy with some eroticism and a spattering of gore concealed within subtext and metaphor. I happily look forward to her next concept collection, An Exorcism of Angels. Her sense of theme is always a major strength in her poetry.
    2 people found this helpful
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