Simone Muench

Collaboration means creation. These poems expand from that natural cycle of visionary poetry, that invites more than one poet to get involved with the poems, until language itself becomes a complete process of imagination and meaning. The result is a book that shares a complex world with the reader and proves that true poetry does not leave anyone alone.— Ray Gonzalez

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 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

Wolf Centos is comprised of centos, a patchwork form that originated around the 4th century. The form is one which re-configures pre-existing poetic texts into new systems of imagery and ideas. The author is able to place poets in conversation with one another across centuries and across continents. Though the poems are explicitly sutured together by the motif of the wolf, they are also linked by other elements, particularly motifs of language, loss, desire, and transformation. Wolf Centos is ultimately elegiac as it oscillates between transformation and stasis, wildness and domesticity, death and beauty, damage and healing, because ultimately our lives constantly shift between these polarities as well. The ultimate knowledge of the poems is that as we age and experience loss, we must retain our ?wildness”?the wolf’s wilderness?inside us. In this way, the wolf becomes a symbol of a threshold, a transformative space.

"Muench's lush figures give great pleasure to both ear and eye, and her imaginative leaps can feel both mysterious and inevitable, in a way that recalls not only Desnos, but also Neruda."—The New York Times Book Review "Her language is refreshing, musical, attenuated."—Anne Waldman Simone Muench lives in Chicago.

There is something utterly in thrall here, honey-slow and fixated. Driven by obsession?in particular, obsession with the legendary French poet, Robert Desnos?Muench’s identification with a true self beyond the self’s known truth is startling. ?from the introduction by Carol Muske-Dukes ?Simone’s poems have a confidence and sophistication of what I like to call intentionality. Also wit, grace, poise, and a relationship to writing beyond self-referential feeling.” ?Anne Waldman ?Lush, sprouting, sensuous images line-by-line, adopting myth freely, Muench’s poems are volatile explosives, circling beauty.”?James Tate

[T]here is something utterly in thrall here, honey-slow and fixated. Driven by obsession—in particular, obsession with the legendary French poet, Robert Desnos—Muench’s identification with a true self beyond the self’s known truth is startling.—from the introduction by Carol Muske-Dukes “Simone’s poems have a confidence and sophistication of what I like to call intentionality. Also wit, grace, poise, and a relationship to writing beyond self-referential feeling.”—Anne Waldman “Lush, sprouting, sensuous images line-by-line, adopting myth freely, Muench’s poems are volatile explosives, circling beauty.”—James Tate Simone Muench is poetry editor of ACM and is an assistant professor at Lewis University, as well as a doctoral student at the University of Illinois at Chicago.