Simple Machines: Sonnets

by Jehanne Dubrow

Jehanne Dubrow s Simple Machines is anything but simple, though it does, as promised, provide the comforting rhythm of a beautiful machine. Even the title page is made up of perfectly metrical sonnets, all either helping to create a feeling of confinement (like the section on homogenized suburbia); of control in the face of feeling of helpless chaos (the poems about elections and the separation between family and friends); or of organization within the whole galaxy and our place in it (the way the poems about love and the moon interact). Simple Machines is a beautiful book exploring how "architecture of studied disarray" eventually leads the speaker s voice to "find a way to orbit on [their] own."

80 pages, Hardcover

Published November 1, 2020

About the author

Jehanne Dubrow is the author of nine books of poetry, including most recently, Wild Kingdom (Louisiana State University Press, 2021) and a book of creative nonfiction, throughsmoke: an essay in notes (New Rivers Press, 2019). Her previous poetry collections are American Samizdat, Dots & Dashes, The Arranged Marriage, Red Army Red, Stateside, From the Fever-World, and The Hardship Post. She has co-edited two anthologies, The Book of Scented Things: 100 Contemporary Poems about Perfume and Still Life with Poem: Contemporary Natures Mortes in Verse.

Jehanne's poems, essays, and book reviews have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Poetry, Southern Review, Pleiades, Colorado Review, and The New England Review. Her work has been featured by American Life in Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, The Slowdown, Fresh Air, The Academy of American Poets, as well as on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. She is the founding editor of the literary journal, Cherry Tree.
Jehanne earned a B.A. in the "Great Books" from St. John's College, an MFA in poetry from the University of Maryland, and a PhD in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. In her free time, she is currently earning another MFA—this time in creative nonfiction—from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

She has been a recipient of the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry from Beloit Poetry Journal, the Crab Orchard Series Open Competition Award, the Diode Editions Book Contest, the Editors' Prize in Prose from Bat City Review, the Firecracker Award in Prose from CLMP, the Mississippi Review Prize in Poetry, the Towson University Prize for Literature, an Individual Artist's Award from the Maryland State Arts Council, a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship and a Howard Nemerov from the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and a Sosland Foundation Fellowship from the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The daughter of American diplomats, Jehanne was born in Vicenza, Italy and grew up in Yugoslavia, Zaire, Poland, Belgium, Austria, and the United States. She lives in Denton with her two Bedlington Terriers, Lola and Bandit, and with her husband, Jeremy, who recently retired from a 20-year career in the U.S. Navy. Jehanne is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of North Texas.