Triptychs

by Sandra Simonds

Sandra Simonds’s Triptychs is a brilliant intersection of poetic form and the passage of time.

Crafted initially in strips handwritten on rolls of receipt paper obtained at a dollar store, then assembled into three textual columns that sit side-by-side on the page, these triptychs are joined or disjoined in several ways—through diction, through the special relation of words (evoking intimacy, touch or, in contrast, alienation), and through thematic similarities or dissimilarities. As a result, the poems energize the confines of this writing space as they invite readers to recall painterly constructions and news headlines, wherein each pillar is in conversation with another, sequentially and simultaneously. With the same lyric attention found in all of Simonds’s poetry, the poems here mark an innovative shift in poetics that is both polyvocal and singular.

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2022

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

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have been really interested in the poetics of temporality through this past spring. I've been reading books that I think occupy time, consider the personal ways someone might move through time, the differences and similarities between being present with someone's poems and what it meant for the poet to have considered the present moment while writing them. Like the poem serves as this touchstone to be in time together.

In my experience of Simonds's work, the poems are often involved with the time it takes to tell the reader something. I think often about her book Orlando, which felt so romantic, not just in how the subject was framed by the poet's thinking or being with someone else but in how she was attached to telling these things. I am so interested in this kind of telling, and what it means for this book, Triptychs. What was the pandemic? How did living through the pandemic change how time exists for each person? And especially with Simonds book, how should mundane objects and events be treated when there is so much time to be aware of our immediate surroundings?

And for my reading, it's this assembly of the mundane, and how the poem might move from one mundane thing to the other that I think gives me greatest access to the central device of the book--the triptych. Because I'm not sure I understand the form's full exercise here. I see it primarily as a reconsideration. Like each subsequent column reconsiders the time and occasion of what happened in the first column. I find great pleasure in reading the poems like this. But I'm also left wondering whether there might be more to be gleaned from the poems as a three-part, perhaps simultaneous experience. Like should I be reading the associative shifts in individual columns, and what feels almost like an overlapping of thinking, a quality I think Simonds often uses in her poems, as signals for how to connect columns? So rather than just a reconsideration, should the reconsideration feel more crowded, almost claustrophobic? I mean, I like how claustrophobic her poems are, the kind of complexity it signals. And the main thing is I don't feel as confident moving into that reading.

[Benjamin · Rating 5 out of 5]

The old paintings are religious, perforce, but they teem with life, vital, beautiful, weird. These poems are triptychs for our time—bringing into three frames the lush, the monstrous, the quotidian, the erotic, and dangerous and letting them move through the eye. Formal poetry walks you through the verse, but three poems side by side let the eye write stories up and down, back and front. Simonds, with her triptychs writes poems of three poetic pieces that cut into each other like Möbius strips, "lengthening the poem indefinitely." Simonds poems are suffused with fantasy, intellect, and longing. They are, like visions of paradise and hell, like saints in the field by a river, natural and unnatural.

Like the old pieced-up paintings with their wood panels, and secret compartments, with gilded edges, and brass hinges, this is a gorgeous book to hold and read—as soft and spare, as gentle and flowing as the words are volcanic and exotic. I will be coming back to these pages again and again.

[Diana Arterian · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't wait for this book to be fully out in the world. It vibrates with importance, attends to concerns of motherhood, lusty encounters, the pandemic, the world feeling (and being) on fire. The way Simonds engages with the triptych form nods to a polyphonic poetry but operates differently (each poem is a separate entity, though they "talk" to each other). I struggle to describe it, because it fights description. This book is an experience, an encounter. I didn't want it to end.

[Amanda Irene · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like the pandemic that inspired them, the poems in Simonds’ newest collection Triptychs force a simultaneous dismantling and reassembling of the world as we know it. These poems sing of the poetical and political, of the mundane and arcane, of the personal and universal. The three-panel form challenges readers to be fully engaged, awake and aware, with a willingness to be guided through and to explore the limitlessness of language.

[Max Vanderleeden · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I know the difference between killing yourself and stepping down the spiral staircase into the cellar of the self, that really meaty, stringy place wrapped in shadows, booming with an arterial pulse so that if you were to kill it, it would mean something.”

[Talia Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

three states of error at once