Poet Sandra Simonds kicks off the Open Field Reading Series at Wayne State University, Monday, January 30, 4 PM, in the Department of English Conference Room, 10302 5057 Woodward Avenue, Detroit. Tuesday, January 31, 7:30, she will lead a discussion on “Antifa Sorcery / Mongrel Dialectics,” at N-Space in the Canfield Lofts, 460 W. Canfield, Detroit. For flyer, click below:
If there is a 24/7 poet now writing, Sandra Simonds is it. Bridging language-centered experimentalism, engaged feminism, media culture, and immediate politics, her poetry demonstrates the neural networking that we require, suffer, and live under millennial capitalism. Writing in fluid and inventive formal structures, she mines the materiality of the everyday, distributing it in nuanced combinations and pushing toward the resistant truths it reveals.
On Further Problems with Pleasure, winner of the 2015 Akron Poetry Prize, Carmen Giménez Smith writes: “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.”
Sandra Simonds is the author of six books of poetry: Orlando (Wave Books, forthcoming 2018), Further Problems with Pleasure (forthcoming from University of Akron Press), Steal It Back (Saturnalia Books, 2015), The Sonnets (Bloof Books, 2014), Mother Was a Tragic Girl (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2012), and Warsaw Bikini (Bloof Books, 2009). Her poems have been anthologized in Best American Poetry 2014 and 2015. She lives in Tallahassee, Florida and is an assistant professor of English and Humanities at Thomas University in Thomasville, Georgia.
Sandra Simonds’ work can be accessed online at her home page, www.sandrasimondspoet.com, and at Harriet, blog of the Poetry Foundation. www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/sandra-simonds.
For further information, contact Prof. Barrett Watten, Department of English, Wayne State University, b.watten@wayne.edu.
