The Poet’s Game by Paul Vidich
Paul Vidich’s The Poet’s Game masterfully captures the essence of a classic spy novel. Vidich weaves a compelling narrative filled with intrigue, suspense, and carefully crafted characters. Alex Matthews is a retired CIA station chief, now capitalizing on the new Russian economy. He learns the hard way that the Russians have a long memory, and he will need to risk everything to keep himself and his business alive. Vidich’s attention to detail and his deep understanding of the espionage genre make this book a must-read for fans of spy fiction.
The Poet’s Game by Paul Vidich, (List Price: $27.95, Pegasus Books, 9781639368853, May 2025)
Reviewed by Brent Bunnell, Fiction Addiction in Greenville, South Carolina
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The father in the story “All the Other Demons” is an exaggerated version of my own dad, a weird, verbose man who loved to spellbind his children with strange tales and arcane lore, patchwork narratives drawn from whatever sources he needed to hold our imaginations captive. As I grew older and started performing my own version of the charismatic raconteur, my father said I suffered from a “hyperbolic condition,” a genetically inherited illness enhanced by a steady diet of tall tales. By the time I started writing poetry in high school, I was possessed with the power of language, and my main goal was to enchant readers with streams of words—never mind the subject matter.
I’ve always thought that the legend of the fox is so fascinating. In Chinese literature and also Japanese and Korean legends, the fox is a shapeshifter, as you mentioned, who can turn itself into a very attractive person. And folklore is full of these stories – many of them odd figments of stories – of foxes who interact with people, often tricking them, sometimes killing them or making off with their property.
I live in Portland — so very close to Seattle — and like you said, everyone in the Pacific Northwest lives under the shadow of something coming that you can never really prepare for. And as a climate journalist, I was really interested in that. I was interested in the ways that we can’t get prepared. And at the time that I started writing this book, I was also pregnant. Pregnancy and having a kid is another thing that everyone tells you to get prepared for, because of how scary and unknowable it is, but the reality is that it’s completely unknowable. You cannot imagine it until you have lived through it. I think that, thematically, is what brought me to the book. What gave me the idea for the book was definitely that I was terrified of the earthquake. I was pregnant, and I could not stop thinking about the earthquake.
When I first conceived of these stories, around 2016, a lot of trans writing was very sure that it had to be a specific thing: In order to capture the trans experience, we have to invent a totally new narrative for this wild and different style of life that has strange punctuation and asterisks and parentheses in it! And I was very resistant to this because I was like, I actually think that trans lives are built out of the exact same things that any other life is built out of. The emotions that are operative for a trans person are the exact same emotions that are operative for anybody else. It may be arranged slightly differently or with slightly different balances, but 99 percent of them are all the same. And so, there was a way in which I was like, You know what? I’m going to just write trans stories to show that you don’t need to invent some othering form to explain a trans life. You can explain a trans life in a teen romance. Then, I just started finding them fun. 
