National Poetry Month Spotlight: Simone Muench

Here at Black Lawrence Press we are celebrating National Poetry Month with a poem a day, featuring a total of 30 authors from our list. Today’s featured poet is Simone Muench, author of Trace.
 
Wolf Cento
There are wolves in the next room
waiting when I turn towards you
snake-spined, all Pentecostal shivers
beneath the sun’s cooled carbon wing
as we wait for something which is not the rain.
Step by step you leave yourself—
the ship of a clear October’s end.
Our lives are language, our desire apophatic:
the stars slowly clicking themselves apart
like bees that forget the topography of their hives.
Now that all your distance surrounds me,
your mouth is the blue door I walk through.
Its bright impossibility pours into me & vanishes
in those stars whose light speaks a language.
The beautiful boys will run in that light
where honey tightens in a coherence of rays
where my sleepwalker’s movements slide
like rain running under the peach tree,
sweet vowels of shadow & water.
The world has only one voice.
It’s not you I’ve lost.
 
Simone Muench is the author of five full-length poetry collections including The Air Lost in Breathing (Marianne Moore Prize; Helicon Nine, 2000), Lampblack & Ash (Kathryn A. Morton Prize; Sarabande, 2005), Orange Crush (Sarabande, 2010), Disappearing Address co-written with Philip Jenks (BlazeVOX, 2010), and Wolf Centos (Sarabande, August 2014). In addition, her recent chapbook Trace is the recipient of the Black River Contest (Black Lawrence Press, 2014).
She is a recipient of a 2014 Artsmith Residency, a 2013 NEA fellowship, a 2013 Yaddo residency, two Illinois Arts Council Fellowships, two Vermont Studio Center Fellowships, the PSA’s Bright Lights/Big Verse Contest and others. She received her Ph.D from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and now directs the writing program at Lewis University where she teaches creative writing and film studies, while serving as chief faculty advisor for Jet Fuel Review. Her website is simone@simonemuench.