Trace

by Simone Muench

Poetry. Through these 26 haunting poems, which draw from sources ranging from Dante to Baudelaire to Berryman to Millay, Simone Muench reimagines the figure of the wolf and the cento form by interrogating the possibilities, limits, and interplay of language, the human animal, and the hungry landscapes of relationship and poetic homage. Muench's speakers confront their own darkness and mortality through flickers of wilderness and "Tonight, the wolf is a solitary shadow / that spills between stone & revery / as bodies resume their boundaries. / ... / Facedown, I lick away the footprints." Through evocations of the animate self—wolf and human—Muench's traces leave behind a living heart, a mark in the snow. Lyrical, elliptical, and intertextual, TRACE looks fiercely into the animal dark to reveal "a vaulting sunrise, hissing salt."

Genres: Poetry

35 pages, Paperback

First published April 15, 2014

About the author

Simone Muench was raised in Benson, Louisiana and Combs, Arkansas. She is the author of five full-length collections including Lampblack & Ash (Sarabande, 2005), Orange Crush (Sarabande, 2010), and Wolf Centos (Sarabande, August, 2014). Her most recent chapbook Trace received the Black River Award (Black Lawrence Press, 2014). Some of her honors include an NEA fellowship, Illinois Arts Council fellowships, Marianne Moore Prize for Poetry, Kathryn A. Morton Prize for Poetry, PSA’s Bright Lights/Big Verse Contest, and residency fellowships to Yaddo, Artsmith, and VSC. She received her Ph.D from UIC, and is Professor of English at Lewis University where she serves as chief faculty advisor for Jet Fuel Review. Collaborative sonnets, written with Dean Rader, are forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, New American Writing, Zyzzyva, Blackbird, and others.

Reviews

[Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this! It felt completely hypnotic and wild. It reminds me of the feminist message behind Women Who Run with the Wolves, only in the delicious and dizzying poetic form of centos.

[Grady · Rating 5 out of 5]

At the spinning wheel

The cover of this little treasure of a book sets a mood of wonderment: the art is titled `The Scribe' and is by Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison and the mystical combination of a hand connected to what appears of be medical contraptions allowing the hand to trace a line in blood in the snow makes visual some of the intangible references between man and nature and language in the poetry of Simone Muench.

Collectively called `Wolf Centos' it is important to understand the definition of `cento': a cento is a poetical work wholly composed of verses or passages taken from other authors; only disposed in a new form or order. What Simone Muench has achieved in these 26 poems is usurp fragments of famous poets' works- works that include fragments of Baudelaire, Dante, John Berryman and Edna St Vincent Millay and others - and weave these into encounters with the figure of the wolf and extending that into brushes with death, mortality, and the strangeness of being. Her little rhapsodies mesmerize, fascinate, and incite awe at the sheer beauty of the way she spins words from her loom. Some examples:

No cause you should weep, Wolf.
Your emptiness has put on weight.
Shall I hang you on the wall,
near this window struck by rain?
Even words grow thin & transparent:
a squirrel's stretched out skin,
empty like the cottages in fall,
whispered by one human to another.
At the instant you disappear like a splinter
in the sea, you could be a tear
in the eyes of a country. If you wish
I shall speak, not of self, but of geography.
If you wish, I shall rage on raw meat.

I have looked too long into human eyes.
I have stood for a long time
like a dream printed on paper
while all the leaves leaked gold
as the wolf sang once again -
nerve-sprung & half electric
in the dark tree of the self.
You will always be a some border
of a blue blade: a lunar
landscape of wounds; a river net
of anatomy. Your animal companion.
Show them the marks left where you merged.

Writing of this quality is too rare. Visiting Muench's poetry is entering a dreamscape with eyes fully open. Brilliant.

[Stacy · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's hard for me to know how to review a book of centos. As I responded to many individual lines, I was also aware that those lines were written by other poets. But the sheer knowledge needed to gather these lines, and the skill involved in assembling them in a meaningful way to create a new, larger work, is so impressive. These poems moved me on a visceral level and I read most of them multiple times.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are some missteps here, but not many. The fact that she could put together an entire coherent chapbook using lines from the work of a myriad of authors is impressive. Worth reading. Muench is a smart writer with a love of the language. Recommended.

[Gerry LaFemina · Rating 2 out of 5]

I like the idea of the cento. I like the idea of a series of centos. As it turns out, though, this collection, for me, felt too enmeshed in the idea, the form never enabling the poems to generate emotion from poem to poem. In the end I was left cold.