Nets The Sonnets of William Shakespeare

"Bervin shows us ways in which we might open up pre- or over-determined uses of past structures without erasing them--making the poems all the more complex by their refusal to dislocate. Her Nets is context responsive and responsible, without the knot of lyric-envy and linguistic guilt of many contemporary poems that pillage the past for strangeness, or worse, for an energetic imagination that might impersonate the writer's. --Christine Hume, Aufgabe. Process note from Jen Bervin: "I stripped Shakespeare's sonnets bare to the 'nets' to make the space of the poems open, porous, possible--a divergent elsewhere. When we write poems, the history of poetry is with us, pre-inscribed in the white of the page; when we read or write poems, we do it with or against this palimpsest."