Welcome to National Poetry Month, 2016! 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.
Today we are featuring poets Simone Muench and Dean Rader whose collaborative collection of sonnets, Suture, will be published in the spring of 2017.
I think; where from and bound, I wonder, where
I think; where from and bound, I wonder, where
and who and when and which, and I would stitch
thunder to air, to blue, to the wound star
of you; I know the sound of clutch and glitch,
gash and gone. The carmine charm of open
mouths, rose clouds. I wound; the body’s coil spring
is both rupture and rapture—a woven
sack of loss and plasma, a suturing
of sky and skull, of cloud and eye, and I
shall ring the loud bell of these bones as one
who owns the wings and knows the way to fly
beyond this body’s sad anatomy. When
wind enters me as though closing a door,
I am the frame, the flaw, the sky, and the scar.
______________________________
Simone Muench is the author of five full-length books including Lampblack & Ash (Sarabande, 2005), Orange Crush (Sarabande, 2010) and Wolf Centos (Sarabande, 2014). Her chapbook Trace won the Black River Chapbook Competition (Black Lawrence Press, 2014). She is a recipient of a 2013 NEA fellowship and The 2014 Meier Foundation for the Arts Achievement Award. She serves as faculty advisor for Jet Fuel Review.
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Dean Rader’s Works & Days, won the 2010 T. S. Eliot Prize, and Landscape Portrait Figure Form (2014) was a Barnes & Noble Review Best Poetry Book of the Year. He is the editor of 99 Poems for the 99 Percent: An Anthology of Poetry and the winner of the 2015 George Bogin Award from the Poetry Society of America. Rader writes and reviews regularly for The San Francisco Chronicle, The Rumpus, The Huffington Post, and The Kenyon Review. He is a professor at The University of San Francisco, where he won the university’s distinguished research award in 2011. Two new poetry collections are forthcoming: Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry (Copper Canyon Press, 2016) and Suture (Black Lawrence Press, 2017).