The line between what is viewed as a poem and the lyrics of a song is blurry, with frequent overlapping of the two forms. It becomes even harder to distinguish between them when the poet is also an accomplished songwriter. Haubert, lead vocalist and lyricist of the heavy metal group, Count Your Dead, offers up the poetic underpinnings of his band's debut album No Return in his latest volume of verse. The result is a book filled with all of the anger and angst that typifies heavy metal music.

Although Count Your Dead's CD only includes 11 songs, Haubert includes in his book approximately 400 poems written over almost a one-year period that, while differing widely in format from his lyrics, still ripple with the same themes found on the album. Self-loathing, doomed love, madness, death, anguish, hatred, drug use, and thoughts about God, Satan, and the afterlife intermingle in short selections of three or four stanzas each that are often replete with explicit language. Many of the poems seem to be cries of help to God to rescue the subject from a hell of his own making but are coupled with the belief that he is also beyond that help. Some, though, such as the moody "Walking the Loop" hold onto the thread of hope that love can be reclaimed even as the speaker slowly heads back to the source of his despair.

Haubert skillfully weaves melancholic imagery with raw emotion to create poems that highlight both the darker side of human existence and his talents as a writer. This collection of pain-driven poetry should be of high interest to fans of Count Your Dead's music.

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