Sandra Simonds

A Marxist feminist epic . Atopia grapples with the political climate of the United States manifested through our everyday lives. Sandra Simonds charts the formations and deformations of the social and political through the observations of the poem's speakers, interspersed with the language of social media, news reports, political speech, and the dialogue of friends, children, strangers, and politicians. The Los Angeles Review of Books characterized Simonds's work as "robust, energetic, fanciful, even baroque" and "a necessary counterforce to the structures of gender, power, and labor that impinge upon contemporary life." These poems reflect on what it means to be human, what it means to build communities within a political structure it also opposes. Tallahassee. Tallahassee. Tallahassee. Your mist today is incredible as it settles on this rose garden! When the largest rose shook off its dew and looked at me like a cartoon, I smiled back and promised not to break his neck. And here we are together again, walking in a park that honors dead children. A tree planted for each child on such a mild day in December. And how the dead children stream through me, scrolls of them: Lily! Rose! Bobby! Kierkegaard says anyone who follows through on an idea becomes unpopular. And also that a person needs a system, otherwise you become mere personality. He must not have known very many poets, so prone to tyrannical shifts in mood. Change in the weather is equal to don't let me go crazy. In the car on the way to school Charlotte says, "I like to be gentle with nature because I like nature." But my mind wouldn't rest, system-less, as I drive through dread: Lily! Rose! Bobby! You're dead, you're dead Sample Poem: .

Atopia

\"If Coleridge, Plath, Ovid, and Celan started a love commune where they built a manifesto Molotov cocktail out of the pastoral, eros, blank verse, and kitsch: it would be this book. A true original, thrilling in her brash complex feminism and virtuosic in sound and line, Simonds writes of the lives and desires trod upon by late capitalism and poetry.\" -Carmen Giménez Smith, 2015 Akron Poetry Prize judge

Further Problems with Pleasure

Jennifer L. Knox

Kirsten Kaschock

Peter Davis

Shanna Compton

Danielle Pafunda

Pattie McCarthy

Bloof Books

Jennifer Tamayo

Jared White

Becca Klaver

Elizabeth Workman

Hailey Higdon

Book of Bloof (a Sampler).

Matt Hart

Catherine Meng

Ray DeJesús

Buck Downs

Curtis Jensen

Gondola

Paige Lewis

Kaveh Akbar

Michael Rothenberg

Jay Snodgrass

A Program Guide

From Atopia

Used White Wife

(or Notes on the Life and Letters)

The Humble Travelogues of Mr. Ian Worthington Written from Land & Sea

Steal It Back takes on the powers that be, heralding the dawn of a revolution

Steal it Back

The Tar Pit Diatoms

Sandra Simonds's Triptychs is a brilliant intersection of poetic form and the passage of time. Crafted initially in strips handwritten on rolls of receipt paper obtained at a dollar store, then assembled into three textual columns that sit side-by-side on the page, these triptychs are joined or disjoined in several ways--through diction, through the special relation of words (evoking intimacy, touch or, in contrast, alienation), and through thematic similarities or dissimilarities. As a result, the poems energize the confines of this writing space as they invite readers to recall painterly constructions and news headlines, wherein each pillar is in conversation with another, sequentially and simultaneously. With the same lyric attention found in all of Simonds's poetry, the poems here mark an innovative shift in poetics that is both polyvocal and singular.

Triptychs

On the 50th anniversary of Ted Berrigan's and the 25th anniversary of Bernadette Mayer's, Bloof Books is thrilled to publish THE SONNETS by Sandra Simonds. As Simonds has written, "There's no consensus on how to do it. Does it have to have a traditional rhyme scheme? Does it need to be written in iambic pentameter? Does it have to be about unrequited love? Does it even need to be fourteen lines? Ask twenty poets these questions, and you'll get two-hundred answers. And simply calling a sonnet a sonnet doesn't really make it a sonnet." THE SONNETS is this poet's exploration of the tradition, as well her testing of the (probably apocryphal) remark made by William Carlos Williams that it's a "fascist form." As for the classic theme of love: "It's easy for me to fool myself into thinking that I'm in love so sometimes I get all tangled up in love triangles, squares and octagons," Simonds explains. "Maybe it's a poet's disease.... In real life relationships people are always vying for power but in the sonnet, it's the poet and the sonnet that are in a struggle to the death. The problem is that the poet is at a huge disadvantage because the sonnet has the history OF THE SONNET on its side and almost always wins." Each of the sonnets here indeed has fourteen lines (and each section fourteen sonnets). Some of the poems rhyme. Most do talk of love, as it burgeons and fades. But as always with Simonds's work, the reader should come to THE SONNETS expecting to be upended. Sandra Simonds is the author of two previous collections of poetry, Warsaw Bikini (Bloof Books, 2008) and Mother Was a Tragic Girl (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2012). Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 2014, the American Poetry Review, Fence, Poetry, and other journals.

The Sonnets

"In Sandra Simonds' poetry, a terrific, nihilistic dislike of herself and others (her heroine 'dires' men) vies with an extreme will to prevail in full color. The tension is sustained by an imagination of remarkable fertility and a rich and crowded verbal palette. Simonds writes to sting. She's like a Plath whose capacity for erotic altruism has thoroughly imploded, producing a crisis that only a brilliant talent could turn into a field of triumphantly exhibited power. Simonds has such a talent." --Cal Bedient

Warsaw Bikini

Poetry. "What does it mean to be a used white wife, a mother, a tragic girl writing poems? Sandra Simonds gets into these messy words and then tears them apart. Sometimes with the words of others. And sometimes with poems made from scratch. They aren't all bad, these words. But they aren't all good either. And that is where MOTHER WAS A TRAGIC GIRL gets its power. You will at moments be laughing but then you will also at moments just as much be crying. If Antigone was alive and decided to write some poems about the nuclear family, she would write them like Sandra Simonds. These are tough." Juliana Spahr "When I look out the window of my Winnebago I want to see a Sandra Simonds poem on the billboard before I crash. Bless her cranky pornboots." Cathy Wagner"

Poems

Mother was a Tragic Girl

A novel from award-winning poet Sandra Simonds. With the lyric beauty of the poet she is, Sandra Simonds gives us a fresh portrait of Assia Wevill, a woman previously conceived mostly as a consort, a homewrecker, or a femme fatale. Simonds' novel refuses to be bound by the pedantry of what we think we know about Assia Wevill's life, reimagining timelines, history, and Assia's inner life and creative work to bring her to life as never before. Assia lacks heroes and villains, a limiting theme of past renditions of this story, giving us not just Assia, but Sylvia Plath, David Wevill, Ted Hughes, and even Assia's young daughter Shura in their troubled, beautiful humanity. Assia is non-linear, but never drops the thread of Wevill's life, instead moving back and forth in time to help us better grasp the choices she, and the people in her orbit, made. The book deftly enfolds and interrogates the mysteries and mythologies of Hitler's Germany, stateless people, Sylvia Plath, Palestine on the brink, and swinging London. "This book is mindblowing. Just when we thought we knew the tragic story of Sylvia Plath or the disturbing details of Ted Hughes' behavior, these pages present Assia Wevill, poet, artist, mother, person. Simonds' brilliance is in reminding us that narratives are just that--a single perspective designed to hold our gaze. Here, Assia moves beyond and around those limited frameworks. In short, this work is more than a reappraisal or a new version of events. It is more like life: striking, messy, quietly revelatory, and beautiful, even in its darkest moments."--Maurice Ruffin Fiction. Women's Studies.

Assia

Simultaneously a scathing critique of consumer culture and a heartbreakingly manic narrative of obsession and reckoning.

Orlando

Sandra Simonds

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