Further Problems with Pleasure

by Sandra Simonds

"If Coleridge, Plath, Ovid, and Celan started a love commune where they built a manifesto Molotov cocktail out of the pastoral, eros, blank verse, and kitsch: it would be this book. A true original, thrilling in her brash complex feminism and virtuosic in sound and line, Simonds writes of the lives and desires trod upon by late capitalism and poetry." —Carmen Gimenez Smith, 2015 Akron Poetry Prize judge"

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Hardcover

First published January 6, 2017

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

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of very few books I was thrilled to read. Simonds has an amazing ear. It’s fast poetry for fast, complicated lives.

[Phil Fryberger · Rating 5 out of 5]

A truly indispensable work of the most irresistible meter and verse, so modern and yet frighteningly timeless.... and dazzling in its sweep of consciousness and history, immediacy and detachment, ecstasy and terror. Simply impossible to put down once you have been drawn into the flow of it.... comparisons with Homer and Ovid are not out of place, in my most humble opinion.

[Helen McClory]

A lot of whether you connect or not to a poem (when competence is evident) is down to personal preference. A lot of these poems failed the leap - word choices not as I'd like, images not quite toothed and hooked and electric. But a few did, and I wonder if when I come back to these another time I might find more from them.