Blue Sunset

What Edgar Lee Masters did for his Spoon River, Illinois, Mary Jo Rabe creates on the planet Mars with her Blue Sunset. Over a hundred and fifty of the first settlers on Mars look back on their lives. Their stories, their triumphs and failures, their loves and losses. A representative sample of what Earth had to offer. The good and the bad, the thoughtful and the clueless, the doers and the quitters, the lovers and the leaders, the vigilantes and the virtuous. They thought they would remake the red planet, but the planet changed them. These epitaphs tell their stories while the universe has the initial last word on this first settlement. Mary Jo Rabe grew up on a small farm in eastern Iowa, earned a B.A. in German and Math from Michigan State University, and spent her junior year in Freiburg Germany, where she met her future husband. She and Franz attended the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she earned a M.A. in Library Science and first encountered and fell in love with science fiction. She has been employed in a small special library in Freiburg, Germany, since 1976. She is a member of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. Mary Jo and her husband live in a small town in the Black Forest. Her poems have been published in Pandora, Stygian Articles, The Martian Wave, Astropoetica, Raven Electrick, Space and Time, The Sword Review, and Mindlfights.