Simone Muench

"Centos are a patchwork form that originated around 300 AD; WOLF CENTOS places poets in conversation with one another across centuries and continents. In this volume Muench sutures her poems together with the motifs of the wolf, language, loss, desire, and transformation. The ultimate knowledge of these poems is that as we age and experience loss, we must retain our "wildness" inside of us"--

Wolf Centos

Carol Muske-Dukes

Winner of the 2004 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, selected by Carol Muske-Dukes

Lampblack & Ash

Dean Rader

Jackie White

Sally Ashton

Poetry. Fiction. Literary Nonfiction. THEY SAID: A MULTI-GENRE ANTHOLOGY OF CONTEMPORARY COLLABORATIVE WRITING includes poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, as well as hybridized forms that push the boundaries of concepts like "genre" and "author." Contributors to this anthology include: Kelli Russell Agodon, Nin Andrews, Elisa Gabbert, Ross Gay, Carol Guess, Carla Harryman, j/j hastain, Lyn Hejinian, Persis Karim, Ada Limon, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Julie Marie Wade, G C Waldrep, and many more.

They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing

Mary Ruefle

Hollis Seamon

John Crowley

Jim Shepard

Jeffrey Ford

Kij Johnson

Sofia Samatar

Paul Di Filippo

Akiko Busch

John Seven

Sonia Sanchez

Karin Lowachee

Paul Park

Sarena Ulibarri

Gregory Scheckler

Izzy Wasserstein

Renee Simms

Safia Elhillo

Tina Connolly

Jorie Graham

Kirsten Imani Kasai

Sara St. Antoine

Karen Shepard

Unoma Azuah

Andrea Martinez Corbin

Shawn Frazier

Christine Poreba

Jennifer Rapaport

Erin Roberts

Marjorie Thomsen

anthology of fine art images from Laura Christensen, and fiction and poetry from numerous authors

Vintage Photography Reimagined by One Artist and Thirty Writers

Then Again

Fiercely intelligent tribute to the "orange girls" of London who sold oranges (and themselves) outside 19th-century theaters.

Poems

Orange Crush

Poetry. "The endurance of the sonnet sequence over the centuries is in no small measure due to a paradox: it is a form that revels both in its fluidity and in its structural exactitude. The sonnet sequence is also apt to engage us because it is typically an expression of solitary yearning, just like the blues. Petrarch longs for his unattainable Laura; Son House laments his dead beloved. In SUTURE, Simone Muench and Dean Rader turn this latter convention of the sonnet sequence on its head, transforming a mode that seems predicated on an essential loneliness into a collaborative effort, one that is rambunctious, wry, companionable, jittery; and, above all, emotionally capacious. Muench and Rader write with an elegant but mysterious synchronicity—like octet and sextet."—David Wojahn

Suture

Poetry. "You and I were told to swallow / our hexed howling, refuse the reptilian // and the mammalian, unless it's tame, / you know, cow-eyed, with a roundness eager / for petting." A powerful evocation of the feminist voice, HEX & HOWL both applies and upends textuality and tradition, parsing and refuting prior masculinist treatments of women's bodies. The poems in this collection forge multi-vocalities, some exhibiting pleasure in the parameters of the sonnet, others designing new poetic architectures through the double and multiple voicings of centos and self-portraits. "Now we do the refusing; now // we flame in the celluloid dark." HEX & HOWL is collaborative writing at its most innovative, playful, and powerful. Muench and White allow for the creation of a chimeric construction, a third-bodied poem that engages in language-play to explode notions of subjectivity, as the "I" and "you" and "we" shift and shimmer with agency and possibility beyond the page. "Like heroines harrowing Hell, Simone Muench and Jackie White rock and reel in these scintillating collaborative sonnets and portraits, resurrecting the girls buried in the woods and garden of misogynist brutality, refracting ruin through ingenious sequences of sense and sound. Wielding needle and shovel, scalpel and gavel, Muench and White 'churn those ashed hours into aurora,' stretching the sonnet's corset into glorious trumpet, 'spinning loose from that pinned darkness' into incantatory song after song --each line a rivet, sorrowful and resplendent, fiery curse and wise dirge --giving voice and ear to those who were not heard, in searing soaring stereo." --Anna Maria Hong "The chapbook HEX & HOWL, a collaboration between Simone Muench and Jackie K. White, delivers twenty-six affirmations of individual resilience in response to forces of silencing or erasure. The title poem sets the premise that 'You and I are told to swallow / our hexed howling, refuse the reptilian // and the mammalian, unless it's tame,' but goes on to signal a sharp shift, 'Now we do the refusing; now // we flame in the celluloid dark, a primal / rewindingâe¦' The poems in this collection invite us to 'Let bees shimmer inside our eyes instead / of men's glory,' and inform us that 'We took the garden with us, now the gavel // is our godhead.' Finding fuel in memory, and ignition in lines from poets such as Akhmatova and Pizarnik, the poems instruct readers that 'We can't recast ruin. / We have to sit in the taint. Survive it.' We exit this chapbook at a point of catharsis, fortified by the sway of sonnets, empowered to face our predicaments with fresh ferocity." --Mary Biddinger

Hex & Howl

Simone Muench

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