Welcome to National Poetry Month, 2015! We’re celebrating all month long. Each day we will bring you a poem we love–a selection from one of our published or forthcoming collections. In turn, the featured poets will introduce poems they love. Happy April!
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.
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Simone has chosen to introduce: “100 Bells” by Tarfia Faizullah.
I admire the multi-vocal declarative “dance” of this poem—its urgency underscored with the swell and surge of its short, ferocious sentences and its clipped cadences. However, more important than anything I have to say about the poem, I would prefer to send you to Tarfia’s own interview.
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Simone Muench is the author of five books, including Lampblack & Ash (Sarabande, 2005; recipient of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize for Poetry and a New York Times Editors’ Choice) Orange Crush (Sarabande, 2010) and Wolf Centos (Sarabande, 2014), which The Kansas City Star listed as one of “The 100 Best Books of 2014.” Her most recent chapbook Trace wom the Black River Chapbook Competition (Black Lawrence Press, 2014).
Some of her honors include an NEA poetry fellowship, the Marianne Moore Prize for Poetry, the Kathryn A. Morton Prize for Poetry, PSA’s Bright Lights/Big Verse Contest, two Illinois Arts Council fellowships, and residency fellowships to Yaddo, Artsmith, and VSC. She received her Ph.D from UIC, and is Professor of English at Lewis University where she serves as chief faculty advisor for Jet Fuel Review. Recently, she was awarded the 2014 Helen Coburn Meier and Tim Meier Foundation for the Arts Achievement Award recognizing mid-career artists for their innovation, past achievements and community contributions.
