"In Sandra Simonds' poetry, a terrific, nihilistic dislike of herself and others (her heroine 'dires' men) vies with an extreme will to prevail in full color. The tension is sustained by an imagination of remarkable fertility and a rich and crowded verbal palette. Simonds writes to sting. She's like a Plath whose capacity for erotic altruism has thoroughly imploded, producing a crisis that only a brilliant talent could turn into a field of triumphantly exhibited power. Simonds has such a talent." --Cal Bedient

Warsaw Bikini

Literature & Fiction

Simonds, Sandra

Poetry

Bloof Books

Atopia (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Tallahassee. Tallahassee. Tallahassee. Your mist today is incredible as it settles on this rose garden! When the largest rose shook off its dew and looked at me like a cartoon, I smiled back and promised not to break his neck. And here we are together again, walking in a park that honors dead children. A tree planted for each child on such a mild day in December. And how the dead children stream through me, scrolls of them: Lily! Rose! Bobby! Kierkegaard says anyone who follows through on an idea becomes unpopular. And also that a person needs a system, otherwise you become mere personality. He must not have known very many poets, so prone to tyrannical shifts in mood. Change in the weather is equal to don't let me go crazy. In the car on the way to school Charlotte says, "I like to be gentle with nature because I like nature." But my mind wouldn't rest, system-less, as I drive through dread: Lily! Rose! Bobby! You're dead, you're dead. Atopia grapples with the political climate of the United States manifested through our everyday lives. Sandra Simonds charts the formations and deformations of the social and political through the observations of the poem's speakers, interspersed with the language of social media, news reports, political speech, and the dialogue of friends, children, strangers, and politicians. The Los Angeles Review of Books characterized Simonds's work as "robust, energetic, fanciful, even baroque" and "a necessary counterforce to the structures of gender, power, and labor that impinge upon contemporary life." These poems reflect on what it means to be human, what it means to build communities within a political structure it also opposes.

Wesleyan University Press

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.

The Sonnets

Poetry. What if all women try to Steal It Back? America, art, life. They're in Sephora, on Twitter, at McDonald's. They're single mothers and teachers, Catholic schoolgirls and martyrs. And they're all stealing it back. Sylvia Plath gets a Malibu beach house. Lady Gaga hatches from an egg of triumph. They're hovering between the tax collectors and the Romantics, between Florida's lakes and every lavish thing in 17th century France. STEAL IT BACK journeys through America's factories, its Bed, Bath, and Beyonds, and its homes, where desires rise and fall, where they decide what they will fight for and what they will concede. STEAL IT BACK, Sandra Simond's fourth poetry collection, is a primal scream that we can't help but pay attention to.

Steal It Back

Saturnalia Books

Further Problems with Pleasure (Akron series in poetry)

\"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 Giménez Smith, 2015 Akron Poetry Prize judge

University Of Akron Press

\"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 Giménez Smith, 2015 Akron Poetry Prize judge

A novel from award-winning poet Sandra Simonds. With the lyric beauty of the poet she is, Sandra Simonds gives us a fresh portrait of Assia Wevill, a woman previously conceived mostly as a consort, a homewrecker, or a femme fatale. Simonds' novel refuses to be bound by the pedantry of what we think we know about Assia Wevill's life, reimagining timelines, history, and Assia's inner life and creative work to bring her to life as never before. Assia lacks heroes and villains, a limiting theme of past renditions of this story, giving us not just Assia, but Sylvia Plath, David Wevill, Ted Hughes, and even Assia's young daughter Shura in their troubled, beautiful humanity. Assia is non-linear, but never drops the thread of Wevill's life, instead moving back and forth in time to help us better grasp the choices she, and the people in her orbit, made. The book deftly enfolds and interrogates the mysteries and mythologies of Hitler's Germany, stateless people, Sylvia Plath, Palestine on the brink, and swinging London. "This book is mindblowing. Just when we thought we knew the tragic story of Sylvia Plath or the disturbing details of Ted Hughes' behavior, these pages present Assia Wevill, poet, artist, mother, person. Simonds' brilliance is in reminding us that narratives are just that--a single perspective designed to hold our gaze. Here, Assia moves beyond and around those limited frameworks. In short, this work is more than a reappraisal or a new version of events. It is more like life: striking, messy, quietly revelatory, and beautiful, even in its darkest moments."--Maurice Ruffin Fiction. Women's Studies.

Assia

Genre Fiction

Noemi Press

With breathtaking fervor, Sandra Simonds delivers an extended address to Orlando, which stands as both a city marked by vibrant promises fallen into betrayals and abuses and the specter of a past lover. Developing a series of recurring episodes and detailing an intricate network of relationships entangled in love, pain, anger, and compassion, this book boldly approaches personal trauma and memory in order to better understand the present.

Orlando

Self-Help

Relationships

Wave Books

Orlando (Wave Books)

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Simonds, Sandra. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Simonds, Sandra

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Simonds, Sandra. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Warsaw Bikini

Atopia (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Atopia (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

The Sonnets

Steal It Back

Further Problems with Pleasure (Akron series in poetry)

Further Problems with Pleasure (Akron series in poetry)

Assia

Orlando

Orlando (Wave Books)