The Sonnets

by Sandra Simonds

On the 50th anniversary of Ted Berrigan's and the 25th anniversary of Bernadette Mayer's, Bloof Books is thrilled to publish THE SONNETS by Sandra Simonds. As Simonds has written, "There's no consensus on how to do it. Does it have to have a traditional rhyme scheme? Does it need to be written in iambic pentameter? Does it have to be about unrequited love? Does it even need to be fourteen lines? Ask twenty poets these questions, and you'll get two-hundred answers. And simply calling a sonnet a sonnet doesn't really make it a sonnet." THE SONNETS is this poet's exploration of the tradition, as well her testing of the (probably apocryphal) remark made by William Carlos Williams that it's a "fascist form." As for the classic theme of love: "It's easy for me to fool myself into thinking that I'm in love so sometimes I get all tangled up in love triangles, squares and octagons," Simonds explains. "Maybe it's a poet's disease.... In real life relationships people are always vying for power but in the sonnet, it's the poet and the sonnet that are in a struggle to the death. The problem is that the poet is at a huge disadvantage because the sonnet has the history OF THE SONNET on its side and almost always wins." Each of the sonnets here indeed has fourteen lines (and each section fourteen sonnets). Some of the poems rhyme. Most do talk of love, as it burgeons and fades. But as always with Simonds's work, the reader should come to THE SONNETS expecting to be upended. Sandra Simonds is the author of two previous collections of poetry, Warsaw Bikini (Bloof Books, 2008) and Mother Was a Tragic Girl (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2012). Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 2014, the American Poetry Review, Fence, Poetry, and other journals.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published November 3, 2014

About the author

Sandra Simonds grew up in Los Angeles, California. She earned a B.A. in Psychology and Creative Writing at U.C.L.A, an M.F.A. from the University of Montana, and a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from Florida State University. She is the author of five books of poetry: Further Problems With Pleasure (Forthcoming, University of Akron), Steal It Back (Saturnalia Books, 2015), The Sonnets (Bloof Books, 2014), Mother was a Tragic Girl (Cleveland State University Poetry Center in 2012) and Warsaw Bikini (Bloof Books, 2009).

Reviews

[Sandy olson Olson · Rating 5 out of 5]

w/ out reservation excellence.

[Jason Pettus · Rating 1 out of 5]

2021 reads, #83. These are not actually sonnets, but rather one-page short stories that the author has awkwardly cut up into 14 arbitrary, funny-looking lines and declared a "sonnet." Where's the meter? Where's the rhyme scheme? Where's the all important "turn" on line 9, in which the poet takes what has previously been the theme of the piece for the first eight lines and dramatically spins the whole thing on its head? Without these elements, you don't have a sonnet, just a piece of flash fiction that's been randomly cut into 14 lines, no matter how difficult that then makes it to actually read and try to comprehend what's being said. (Every time I see poems like these, I think back to my third-grade reading class, and all the kids in my class who still didn't quite get how the concept of paragraphs work, and who would take long pauses at the end of each line of text on the page, as if they were finishing a sentence despite actually being in the middle of one; and how contemporary poets for some reason have deliberately created a situation where all their readers end up reading their pieces that way. "And you probably don't know that I'm the girl. [Long pause] Who wrote 'deceased' with a black Sharpie across the front. [Long pause] Of Dodi's chart.") I'm desperately trying to find great examples these days of contemporary formal sonnets, to help inspire me in my quest this year to write my own; but this disappointing book is not it.

[Nate · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I could stay locked in this room listening / to the Replacements for the next two years." <3

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fresh sonnets, they're lively and inviting to read and also clearly there's something happening behind the words.

[Kenning JP Garcia · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book both pure brilliance and biting observations/reflections. Simonds has shown what is possible for this classic form. Content will not be deterred by any such metric constraints instead the shape and style help deliver a very distilled and poignant while also musical view of the world around her and of her.
"... You are my zero-sum game, / my tribe, sailboat catching its cloth lip on the torn horizon. / You are my minus sign, my timeline, mathematic as water stored / in a cube of antimatter..."

[Alexa Doran · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simonds reminds us how incredibly capable the world is of surprise. And how desperately I needed!!! this reminder. Further, Simonds forces us to look at the myriad ways that corporate America has co-opted our ability to feel surprise. The experience is chilling and electrifying at once. In every poem, you can feel Sandra pressing the language for all its worth, uncovering layer after layer after layer. The collection is an insane undressing which I will forever witness.

HOW I WISH I COULD THINK LIKE THIS

WISH / WISH / WISH

[Michael Dean · Rating 5 out of 5]

i love the sonnet!

[Grace · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book. I don't know Sandra Simonds personally, but from following her on social media she seems like a super cool person. Unfortunately, this collection did not deliver for me. The sonnets in this collection are not traditional in the slightest, which I am okay with. I do like modern poetry and I'm not opposed to bending the rules. Yet the modernization of these sonnets was not up my alley. For example, one poem has multiple heart icons, one poem has excessive "fuck"s, and another has a YouTube link. A lot of the poems were too casual/trivial for me, or just not focused on subject matter or with the tone that I prefer. (To contradict my past statement: there are important topics in some of these poems.) I do appreciate what Sandra is trying to accomplish with these poems: they're bold, honest, new, and so very real. So, bravo for those components! They're just not the type of bold, honest, real poems I tend to gravitate towards. All that being said, there were some really fantastic, great lines sprinkled throughout the poems. So even if I didn't love most of the poems as a whole, there were lines that I did love. And there were two poems that I especially liked (in their wholeness): "Come Back!" and "Master of Fine Arts." Even though this book wasn't my cup of tea, it certainly added diversity to the type of poems I read. These are completely different than anything I have read before!

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sandra Simonds' earthy dramatic monologues come in fourteeners, which she characterizes as sonnets, though few of them share the devices or conventions most readers will associate with the high form of sexual practice initiated at court. Eccentric in their movement, only occasionally narrative, Simonds would prefer a sound-tripped hurtle toward the sentence and hang the consistent p.o.v.: "Next, make me a lost mutt by | calling animal control. Put fur in one corner | and then follow her wag to the shelter." ("Animal Kingdom") There's an easiness in the "errs" and "utz" here that gives me confidence, but also, typically, Simonds hurtles past lexical sets to build her types, the persons she only reluctantly satirizes: "Like your husband saying 'Good luck with your life,' | a rare Florida orchid gets drunk on doomsday . . ." The detail about the husband is just stranded, it doesn't amount to more than a candid sly joke, ostensibly at someone's expense. The poems feel poured out, and sometimes the lid doesn't come off without a struggle that's spilling the poet's collateral associations. Some may go for the demotic, rough-hewn self-exposure, but satire is a blunt instrument in these poems.

[Tracy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A new word for this book: heart-dark. Simonds writes about everything and anything, politics to family to love, easily transitioning from cutting-truth to touching hope, spanning Florida to LA. I devoured this over 1 elliptical workout. If you like Bernadette Mayer and Alice Notley you will also love Sandra Simonds.

"Fuck all I say say all I fuck.
Fuck the octopus, the kangaroo,
the summer grass, idiotic and swirling
like a mind of neurons that look as lost
and despondent as sperm in tissue."
(63)