Kirjahaku

"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

A fierce, visionary book-length poem Burning Oracle is a visionary, book-length poem told from the fractures of a world on fire where myth, memory, and contemporary life collide. Cassandra—seer, mother, survivor—wanders through forests of digital noise and historical trauma, her voice both ancient and urgently new. At the heart of the poem is a pilgrimage to the grave of poet Paul Celan where she traces personal loss within the wider context of inherited trauma—particularly the Holocaust—and seeks meaning in the act of remembering. As floods rise and fires rage, the personal and historical ignite a mythic voice. Through the commonplace of stained dresses, shattered screens, and supermarket aisles, Cassandra encounters figures like Goya, Reynard the fox, and Celan himself, weaving their stories into an intertextual, image-rich landscape. Burning Oracle is a feminist reckoning, a personal mythography, and a testament to the power of poetry to animate the archive of history, memory, and everyday life. [sample poem] * From II No source, my Seine, a German one instead, Sixteen & reading Hölderlin's Der Rhein at the foot of a massive statue of Goethe and Schiller. Stupid anorexic American girl. But not really American. And not really French. And not really Turkish. And not really Syrian. And not really Spanish. And the tourists at the camp. Was I a tourist? Squeal of the cassette tape rewinding Pink Floyd's The Wall. Ah, when you speak German, no one can tell you're American. When you speak English no one can tell you're French. Too sick to go on. Anne of Green Gables Figurines. I'm always too sick to go on, that's my charm—a gray ruin turned maroon turned black. * It is easier to go mad, Francisco says, than one might think. Easy to lose things. People too. Perhaps too easy. Step inside and you may not come back. He listed the colors he liked: Black. Black. Black. Black. He told himself to stay inside the painting of the chartreuse river, stay inside, Reader, and he found his arms roping and looping into Cassandra holding a tray of dead pigeons.

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. 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.

Based loosely on the life of Assia Wevill, a German Jew who escaped the Nazis and eventually became the woman whose affair with Ted Hughes broke up his marriage to Sylvia Plath, Assia is the first novel from poet Sandra Simonds. Haunted by Plath's suicide and her own unfulfilled literary ambition, and abandoned by both Hughes and her husband, the real-life Assia struggled to imagine a viable life for herself in the turbulent political landscape of the 1960s. In 1969, she killed herself and her young child, in what is widely viewed as an attempt to copy Plath's famous suicide. Lending a contemporary feminist perspective to an unrecognized chapter in modern literary history, Assia is a novel that asks us to hold our judgment and to consider the personal and political histories of people who commit unthinkable acts.

With breathtaking fervor, Sandra Simonds delivers an extended address to Orlando, which stands as both a city marked by vibrant promises fallen into betrayals and abuses and the specter of a past lover. Developing a series of recurring episodes and detailing an intricate network of relationships entangled in love, pain, anger, and compassion, this book boldly approaches personal trauma and memory in order to better understand the present.

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. Each poem is wildly surprising, ranging from conversations between Baudelaire and Jayne Eyre to the enjoyment of macaroons. 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.

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. Each poem is wildly surprising, ranging from conversations between Baudelaire and Jayne Eyre to the enjoyment of macaroons. 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.