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Monogamy Songs
Monogamy Songs is some kind of new beast. Maybe it's a memoir. Or a book of prose poems. Or maybe those "poems" are really mini-snapshots of true, horny, heartbroken, frustrated, medicated, nervous, passionate, jealous, sweaty domesticity. Sherl's language in this book is spiked and unguarded, sometimes in shocking ways. It's also breathtakingly beautiful. Monogamy Songs is the most personal book so far by this exciting young writer.
"Being in love is finding a person to be lonely through, and when that person goes to the hospital, stuffing that hole of loneliness with a ball of bright red construction paper. "I'm dying," you'll say, with the paper everywhere, stuck with sweat to the walls where you fucked someone else, taped to the bottom of the bathtub. Gregory Sherl's Monogamy Songs is a book of lies. Everything is a lie, even this. And it's one of the truest books I've read." --Zachary Schomburg
Gregory Sherl is the author of two poetry collections: The Oregon Trail is the Oregon Trail and Heavy Petting, as well as the chapbooks I Have Touched You and Last Night Was Worth Talking About. His writing has appeared in Pank, The Los Angeles Review, The Good Men Project, Columbia Poetry Review, NAP, New Delta Review, and many other publications. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi.
"Being in love is finding a person to be lonely through, and when that person goes to the hospital, stuffing that hole of loneliness with a ball of bright red construction paper. "I'm dying," you'll say, with the paper everywhere, stuck with sweat to the walls where you fucked someone else, taped to the bottom of the bathtub. Gregory Sherl's Monogamy Songs is a book of lies. Everything is a lie, even this. And it's one of the truest books I've read." --Zachary Schomburg
Gregory Sherl is the author of two poetry collections: The Oregon Trail is the Oregon Trail and Heavy Petting, as well as the chapbooks I Have Touched You and Last Night Was Worth Talking About. His writing has appeared in Pank, The Los Angeles Review, The Good Men Project, Columbia Poetry Review, NAP, New Delta Review, and many other publications. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi.
- GenresPoetry
132 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 2012
5 people are currently reading
177 people want to read
About the author
Gregory Sherl
15 books34 followersGregory Sherl is a novelist and poet. His debut novel, The Future for Curious People, will be released by Algonquin Books on September 2nd, 2014. It has been translated into five languages.
He is also the author of three poetry collections, including The Oregon Trail is the Oregon Trail, shortlisted for the 2012 Believer Poetry Award and a semifinalist for Best Poetry in the 2012 Goodreads Choice Awards.
He is also the author of three poetry collections, including The Oregon Trail is the Oregon Trail, shortlisted for the 2012 Believer Poetry Award and a semifinalist for Best Poetry in the 2012 Goodreads Choice Awards.
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
January 16, 2013
I've been a big Sherl fan ever since getting unexpectedly sucked into his first book, the now-rare and sought-after I Have Touched You (Dark Sky). This, his 4th book in a pretty short time frame, is his most personal work. As the publisher, you might think I'm biased, but I really do think this is one of the best breakup books ever. In fact, it cuts so close to the bone, there were times when Greg wanted to cancel the publication. I had to assure him that this was an important book and that readers would embrace the naked (sometimes hard) honesty within. This is the kind of book that helps people become better. It is a book that tries to do the near impossible--cure heartbreak.
December 13, 2012
Monogamy Songs is 2 sides (a and b) of sherlness at its best. Song samples, take them as tracks, select lines from a Vicodin sea of memorable ones:
Track 1 - "Touching makes the morning come quicker."
Track 2 - "There's no reason to care about the weather when there are roofs."
Track 3 - "What is so magical about a marker?"
Track 4 - "When I am not writing poems, I am breaking backs."
Track 5 - "This book is a sing-along poem."
Track 6 - "At McDonalds I always try to supersize my gravatas."
Track 7 - "I hope I am so late to work the world is already ending."
Track 8 - "I have done so many studies on the economics of my heart someone should give me a lab coat."
Track 9 - "Ghost fucking is a naked haunted house."
Track 10 - "I don't know why balloons exist, except to make children cry when they drop the string."
Track 11 - "On the news people are sleeping in parks but it's okay because pepper spray is now considered a vegetable."
Track 12 - "In my heart I am busy packing a picnic I won't have time to eat."
I think it's about time Gregory Sherl takes the book and reads from it in rhythm with the beat laid down by a few masterful beatboxers. Gregory Sherl - a man of poetry and many fucks, a man of heart and a hell of a rap career ahead of him. Sherl hip hop book tour 2013?
Track 1 - "Touching makes the morning come quicker."
Track 2 - "There's no reason to care about the weather when there are roofs."
Track 3 - "What is so magical about a marker?"
Track 4 - "When I am not writing poems, I am breaking backs."
Track 5 - "This book is a sing-along poem."
Track 6 - "At McDonalds I always try to supersize my gravatas."
Track 7 - "I hope I am so late to work the world is already ending."
Track 8 - "I have done so many studies on the economics of my heart someone should give me a lab coat."
Track 9 - "Ghost fucking is a naked haunted house."
Track 10 - "I don't know why balloons exist, except to make children cry when they drop the string."
Track 11 - "On the news people are sleeping in parks but it's okay because pepper spray is now considered a vegetable."
Track 12 - "In my heart I am busy packing a picnic I won't have time to eat."
I think it's about time Gregory Sherl takes the book and reads from it in rhythm with the beat laid down by a few masterful beatboxers. Gregory Sherl - a man of poetry and many fucks, a man of heart and a hell of a rap career ahead of him. Sherl hip hop book tour 2013?
March 8, 2019
More like 3 1/2 stars
January 29, 2013
TOP SHELF review. First appeared in the January, 24, 2013 edition of The Monitor
The Unbearable Lightness of Valium and OCD
Gregory Sherl’s poetry is startling, full of disjointed, exciting and heartbreaking images. Distilling vulnerability, depression, sexuality and ennui, his chapbooks and collections give poignant voice to a whole generation of pop-culture-obsessed, cereal-swilling, unmoored young men. Critics have begun to sit up and take notice.
In his latest collection, Monogamy Songs, Sherl narrates through loosely connected prose poetry the clearly autobiographical relationship between “Greg” and “Z,” two broken souls who come together amid psychoses and drugs to — for a time — find an answer to their loneliness in each other. Greg teaches remedial English at a community college in Florida and writes poetry (often lamenting his abandoned rap career) between visiting a therapist and taking anti-depressants. Greg hints that his brokenness was inevitable; he doesn’t blame his parents, though he acknowledges they didn’t know what to do with him: “What happened is my parents lost the instructional manual. They did the best they could. More things should be Saran wrapped.”
Greg is also apparently deeply affected by knowledge that his sister, Stephanie, was stillborn, and it’s clear that she has become a sort of angelic symbol to him (reminding me of sci-fi author Philip K. Dick, whose obsession with his dead twin sister colored his work with an existential sadness similar to what I find in Sherl’s poetry).
Z and Greg spend months together, delighting in their physical intimacy, creating the sort of private world typical of all lovers, but deepened and isolated more by their multiple dysfunctions. The first 85 pages or so chart this relationship with unforgettable imagery, humor, and frankness. But then Z begins to “threaten” Greg “with babies,” and the narrator “breaks monogamy.” I suspect that, beyond the normal (nearly cliché) aversion to fatherhood, the specter of Greg’s dead sister and his own ineffective upbringing push him away from the sort of family Z needs. The break-up puts him in an even darker emotional state: “I don’t know why balloons exist,” he reflects, “except to make children cry when they drop the string.” He begins to sleep with a series of women, clearly trying to efface his feelings and her memory. He cannot, and in the end he accepts that the relationship has “emotionally educated” him.
Monogamy Songs is, in the end, a powerful meditation on the ways in which our neuroses can destroy our relationships and isolate us. Or is it? Sherl’s epilogue cleverly invites us to see something even deeper: “I have been lying to you before you even thought to buy this book. You were born and I was standing above you and I was telling you that you would always be loved and that God was kind and that you would always be loved with the kindness God felt when he took clay and thought giants with tiny arms should have sharp teeth.”
The Unbearable Lightness of Valium and OCD
Gregory Sherl’s poetry is startling, full of disjointed, exciting and heartbreaking images. Distilling vulnerability, depression, sexuality and ennui, his chapbooks and collections give poignant voice to a whole generation of pop-culture-obsessed, cereal-swilling, unmoored young men. Critics have begun to sit up and take notice.
In his latest collection, Monogamy Songs, Sherl narrates through loosely connected prose poetry the clearly autobiographical relationship between “Greg” and “Z,” two broken souls who come together amid psychoses and drugs to — for a time — find an answer to their loneliness in each other. Greg teaches remedial English at a community college in Florida and writes poetry (often lamenting his abandoned rap career) between visiting a therapist and taking anti-depressants. Greg hints that his brokenness was inevitable; he doesn’t blame his parents, though he acknowledges they didn’t know what to do with him: “What happened is my parents lost the instructional manual. They did the best they could. More things should be Saran wrapped.”
Greg is also apparently deeply affected by knowledge that his sister, Stephanie, was stillborn, and it’s clear that she has become a sort of angelic symbol to him (reminding me of sci-fi author Philip K. Dick, whose obsession with his dead twin sister colored his work with an existential sadness similar to what I find in Sherl’s poetry).
Z and Greg spend months together, delighting in their physical intimacy, creating the sort of private world typical of all lovers, but deepened and isolated more by their multiple dysfunctions. The first 85 pages or so chart this relationship with unforgettable imagery, humor, and frankness. But then Z begins to “threaten” Greg “with babies,” and the narrator “breaks monogamy.” I suspect that, beyond the normal (nearly cliché) aversion to fatherhood, the specter of Greg’s dead sister and his own ineffective upbringing push him away from the sort of family Z needs. The break-up puts him in an even darker emotional state: “I don’t know why balloons exist,” he reflects, “except to make children cry when they drop the string.” He begins to sleep with a series of women, clearly trying to efface his feelings and her memory. He cannot, and in the end he accepts that the relationship has “emotionally educated” him.
Monogamy Songs is, in the end, a powerful meditation on the ways in which our neuroses can destroy our relationships and isolate us. Or is it? Sherl’s epilogue cleverly invites us to see something even deeper: “I have been lying to you before you even thought to buy this book. You were born and I was standing above you and I was telling you that you would always be loved and that God was kind and that you would always be loved with the kindness God felt when he took clay and thought giants with tiny arms should have sharp teeth.”
February 26, 2013
bought this from the poet after hearing him read at a well umm poetry reading lol I dont know if I would have liked it if I had picked it up before I heard him. Now, I hear his voice as I read, and it's sexy as hell ;) I had to read it quickly, a quick shot of wow and WTF! and man I just wanna give this guy a hug, but he says half the things he writes are lies, but then turns around and says he's lying about that too! Gotta love it :) Going back and rereading the book, marking out lines where Im like "HUH?!" and like "Yeah, I know exactly what you mean", and parts where Im like "I only have some inkling of what you're saying, but man does it feel right!" I'll post a pic of my flagged book after Im done :D
May 28, 2013
Each poem in this book is like a little supermarket full of really good things, all crowded with shoppers and people giving samples of BBQ sauce and beer and pharmaceuticals, but Godzilla is always looming, like you know he is over major Asian cities, or lurking in the water somewhere, and so I finished the book with one eye open and the other held shut with a paperclip. I felt like I felt when I used to hear my parents fighting in the next room, and then the next day when they were happier and made apple pancakes and we went on a drive to the arboretum, only since I was in high school, I guess I was not that little, and had a boyfriend of my own. That was actually a mistake.
I read everything Gregory Sherl.
I read everything Gregory Sherl.
January 22, 2014
Gregory Sherl taught me that you don't have to be good at poetry to write a poem.
Reminds me of being strung out on Valium, tense, anxious, horny, sick. A stream of conscious, just say words and maybe one day they'll be pretty.
Sherl leads us through prose that are littered with disjointed things, lovers, lots of lovers, drugs and lyrical references and disappointment that his rap career didn't take off.
Reminds me of being strung out on Valium, tense, anxious, horny, sick. A stream of conscious, just say words and maybe one day they'll be pretty.
Sherl leads us through prose that are littered with disjointed things, lovers, lots of lovers, drugs and lyrical references and disappointment that his rap career didn't take off.
September 12, 2013
The best part of this little book is its genre bending nature -- part poem, part narrative, part meditation -- it fed that part of me that is always craving something a little bit different. My biggest complaint was that the first person narration was just self-involved enough to make me feel like I wasn't in the narrator's skin as much as sitting on the couch listening to him.
January 31, 2013
Immerse yourself in Monogamy Songs, but be prepared to know and feel too much.
(My full review appears on Glorified Love Letters.)
(My full review appears on Glorified Love Letters.)
August 6, 2013
This is the kind of poetry that you read and think "well, that doesn't sound hard and is this really poetry" and then you're like "omg this is brilliant." A funny and honest account of mental illness and heartbreak, all in prose poem form.
February 5, 2014
A pretty interesting book.
Full review at Word Riot.
Full review at Word Riot.
December 27, 2012
Interview forthcoming at Monkeybicycle, an imprint of Dzanc Books
August 14, 2015
Serial abuser Gregory Sherl writes stories about how he sees the world from his side of the abuse. Don't buy this book, don't read this book, stop supporting this heinous piece of garbage.
September 27, 2013
A stirring series of prose poems that articulate nuances of sex, depression and heartache. Beautiful and harsh at the same time.
Read
February 4, 2014i finished reading this in two sittings. and what i know, for sure, about Gregory Sherl, is that i never want to be finished reading Gregory Sherl.
August 25, 2016
not as good as the oregon trail is the oregon trail.
did make me consider sending a lot of emails to my exesexesxesesesesses
did make me consider sending a lot of emails to my exesexesxesesesesses
not-interested
July 4, 2015The epitome of a tortured fuckboy.
November 9, 2021
Wow.. I remember thinking when I first read it that it was profound and weird and sexy .. what even is this idk
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews