Monograph Poems [Paperback]

SIMEON BERRY has been an associate editor for Ploughshares, and won a Massachusetts Cultural Council Individual Artist Grant and a Career Chapter Award from the National Society of Arts and Letters. His first book, Ampersand Revisited, won the 2013 National Poetry Series. He lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.Written in narrow sections that blur the distinction between flash fiction and prose poetry, between memoir and meditation, Monograph veers from the elliptical to the explosive as it dissects the Gordian knot of a marriage’s intellectual, sexual, and domestic lives. Invoking Raymond Chandler, Pythagoras, Joan Didion, and Virginia Woolf as presiding spirits, Simeon Berry curates the negative space of each wry tableau, destabilizing the high seriousness of every lyric aside and slipping quantum uncertainty into the stark lineaments of loss.The 2014 National Poetry Series selection, chosen by Denise DuhamelAfter inhaling Simeon Berry’s latest collection (and his second National Poetry Series win!), I admit I am a total sucker for the monograph (a detailed study of one relatively narrow topic), and Berry’s monographic treatment of his particular topic—which I absolutely will not give away here—in particular. If you enjoyed Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and Eula Biss’s The Balloonists, you will love Berry’s Monograph: obsessive, prismed, wise, shameless—a whole treatise of desire formatted into tiny succulent prose poems or lyrical fictions or bites or bits or installments or glances or confessions: a collage of lovely and disturbing threads. I simply could not put it down.With Monograph, Simeon Berry has found a new and compelling way of doing what presents, rather slyly, as autobiography. By turns acerbic, self-mocking, and gently witty, this book is made of lucid, startling sequences oflc*