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Winner of the Fall 2012 Black River Chapbook Competition
Through these 26 haunting poems, which draw from sources ranging from Dante to Baudelaire to Berryman to Millay, Simone Muench reimagines the figure of the wolf and the cento form by interrogating the possibilities, limits, and interplay of language, the human animal, and the hungry landscapes of relationship and poetic homage. Muench’s speakers confront their own darkness and mortality through flickers of wilderness and heat: “Tonight, the wolf is a solitary shadow / that spills between stone & revery / as bodies resume their boundaries. / … / Facedown, I lick away the footprints.” Through evocations of the animate self – wolf and human – Muench’s traces leave behind a living heart, a mark in the snow. Lyrical, elliptical, and intertextual, Trace looks fiercely into the animal dark to reveal “a vaulting sunrise, hissing salt.”
WOLF CENTO
What do we leave, living?
Always the silence remains kneeling-
each letter a closed house.
& what comes after, looking back
on the mind itself, looking for home
as night drifts up like a little boat
or a pattern of small flowers.
There a screen of vertical timber,
trees fade over into fog
just as bodies flow
safe from the wolf’s black jaw.
First published in Quarterly West
© Richard Every 
