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Articles by Sandra Simonds
Friday and Death
In “St. Joseph’s,” for example, a frantic and desperate speaker cuts up her car’s upholstery “with a plastic knife” to find a pill she “might have dropped.” The car’s interior shifts from getaway vehicle to a sealed space, mirroring the tense enclosures of the domestic sphere that run throughout Kasischke’s sprawling Where Now: New and Selected Poems (2017). Dance and Disappear (2002) contains a series of poems about spontaneous human combustion.
Shocked and Shattered Elegies for a Lost Utopian Dream
You have been granted access, use your keyboard to continue reading. Shocked and Shattered Elegies for a Lost Utopian Dream In “Killing Spree,” Jorie Graham confronts a world living through apocalyptic times. Credit...Joan Wong Sandra Simonds’s latest poetry collection, “Burning Oracle,” was published in February. May 27, 2026, 5:00 a.m. ET KILLING SPREE, by Jorie Graham “Go ahead,” Jorie Graham says in “Killing Spree,” her 16th collection of poetry.
Poetry Review: ‘Night Watch,’ by Kevin Young
You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load. Poetry In “Night Watch,” Kevin Young riffs on Dante’s “Inferno” and gives voice to silenced figures from the nation’s past. By Sandra Simonds Sandra Simonds is the author of eight books of poetry and, most recently, the novel “Assia.” Sept.
A Brain in Flames: Remembering Joshua Clover
Once, at some absurd hour, I sent him a draft of a poem, apologizing for its rawness. He wrote back immediately, “I like it, but it needs more burning Best Buys.” We spent the next hour on the phone working through revisions. When he visited my Poetic Forms class on Zoom, I thought we would talk about line breaks or meter. Instead, we discussed Marx, metaphor, and Public Enemy.
This Be the Place: I Shall Gaze
This Be the Place is a series of short essays in which poets explore the mysteries and meaning of a particular place. It was there when we moved in seven years ago. An octagonal, wooden pavilion in the yard. A gazebo. A tiny plaque bolted to the side told me it was a gift from the local garden club to the previous owner. It seemed wondrous for my husband and I to have our first house, set back from the highway at the end of a dirt road in a tiny town in Vermont.
The Yale Review | Sandra Simonds: "Aubade"
Sandra Simonds He had been human. I remember nothing. —Emily Dickinson For many days, he called. I told him not to; he kept calling. He said he didn’t know why I turned him on. Me either? I hid in a large field of aster because it was May, a time of purples. May, the optimal. I answered that I live a bad life and that I am mad. Shoot me a picture of your lament. How near the hue of kinesis, these spring waters, I answered. He wrapped himself tightly in my prepositions, sent a verb or two between my thighs.
The Victorian on Edge
Sandra Simonds is the author of eight books of poetry and a novel, including Assia (Noemi Press, 2023), Atopia (Wesleyan University Press, 2019), Orlando (Wave Books, 2018), Further Problems with Pleasure, winner of the 2015 Akron Poetry Prize, (Saturnalia Books, 2015), (Bloof Books,...
Combustible Mood
Sandra Simonds is the author of eight books of poetry and a novel, including Assia (Noemi Press, 2023), Atopia (Wesleyan University Press, 2019), Orlando (Wave Books, 2018), Further Problems with Pleasure, winner of the 2015 Akron Poetry Prize, (Saturnalia Books, 2015), (Bloof Books,...
A Certain Kind of Debt
You warned me about striving. You said once they gave you a house with waves of peppermint in the backyard, the Library of Babylon, and free lunch, they would take it away. Still, I ate the fake meat they served on Fridays, always alone with my petite jar of grief. I liked the jar because it gave me something to look forward to. The truth is uncomfortable— now that’s something I told you.
Cassandra Data - Boston Review
I roam the Luxemburg Gardens in apotropaic lusters, in my long, blood red leather skirt from the last century, in my blood red eyelashes, hell red nails, I roam one instance at a time as history circulates the bloodstream in strange ash and crescents.
Sandra Simonds on Piecing Together Poetic Puzzles
Sandra Simonds is the award-winning author of eight books of poetry: Triptychs (Wave Books, November 2022), Atopia (Wesleyan University Press, 2019), Orlando (Wave Books, 2018), Further Problems with Pleasure, winner of the 2015 Akron Poetry Prize from the 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).
I Was Told the Sunlight Was a Cure by Hanif Abdurraqib - Poems | Academy of American Poets
for the cloak of despair thrown over our bright & precious corners but tell that to the lone bird who did not get the memo dizzy & shouting into the newly unfamiliar absence of morning light from atop a sagging branch outside my window—a branch which, too, was closer to the sky before falling into the chorus line of winter’s relentless percussion all of us, victims to this flimsy math of hours I was told there was a cure for this.
I Was Told the Sunlight Was a Cure
Find and share the perfect poems. for the cloak of despair thrown over our bright & precious corners but tell that to the lone bird who did not get the memo dizzy & shouting into the newly unfamiliar absence of morning light from atop a sagging branch outside my window—a branch which, too, was closer to the sky before falling into the chorus line of winter’s relentless percussion all of us, victims to this flimsy math of hours I was told there was a cure for this.
Messing With All of It: Poets Rodrigo Toscano and Sandra Simonds Talk Politics, Poetics, Work, and Class
“Poems don’t have to self-flagellate to be meaningful. That seems very Puritanical. Too American.” Poets Rodrigo Toscano and Sandra Simonds talk about their new books, The Charm & The Dread (Fence Books, 2022), Triptychs (Wave Books, forthcoming November 2022), the downsides of Cultural Managerial Class (CMC’s), lived-life conditions of poetic production, the perils of topicality, motherhood, the sexuality of poems themselves, geo-political musings, and more.
Moving From Elegy to Ecstasy, a Poet Pushes Against the Canon
The Poetry Issue In “Best Barbarian,” Roger Reeves riffs on Western tradition to challenge its omissions and expand its political and artistic possibilities. April 15, 2022, 12:01 a.m. ET Credit...Mark Pernice BEST BARBARIAN Poems By Roger Reeves Proceeding in prayerlike incantation, “Best Barbarian,” Roger Reeves’s terrific second collection, eruditely sets out to unite the Western literary canon with its omissions and oppressions.
By Sandra Simonds
I’m a witch who lost all her powers, then in place of my powers, I got the coiled beauty of seashells and sleeping infants. The coiled beauty of eardrums, and the sound wave of bells. The bells! This is the country of clouds. The molten body, the Floridian pinks, and centuries of sand dollars examining the arcing waves. New territory of interiority and I’m in the middle of this. White like a negative belt. I am an airless thing. When I get high, I get low. But I’m real and airless and love you.
Order by Dan Rosenberg - Poems
with the medicinal poppies of June nor with Celan's bloom-fest of dredged stone, not with history's choo-choo train of corpses, not with Nottingham's Robin Hood nor Antwerp's Diamondland. Not walking on the Strand in Manhattan Beach with her silicone breast implants, refinery, waves of trash, not out of the Library of Alexandria with her burnt gardens that prefigure gnarly, barnacle-laden surfboards broken in half.
The Birthday Interviews by Derrick Austin - Poems | Academy of American Poets
I had never created man before so I invented my son first as a dream body. In order to create the dream body I must first believe in the force of opposites, a terrible tension of what has existed and the struggle yet to come. And it is true, that I had a notion of him for many years; for generations my imagination traveled in search of him. It seems unlikely that a kiss would have roots in the Haitian Revolution, but it does.
This Is Where They Plant The Cheap Pine
This Is Where They Plant The Cheap Pine Sandra Simonds 14 Snaps This is where they plant cheap pine. These kinds of trees don’t communicate with each other. This is not the ecology of the forest, it’s the ecology of a tree farm. They create and destroy themselves for us with no tie to the future or the past.They used to make turpentine here. A lot of workers tortured in the convict leasing programs. The company store was the only place to buy anything.
A Poet Whose Calling Is Doubt Celebrates Language’s Uncertainty
“Absurd/We should approach the heavens/With a yardstick”: Heather McHugh’s new poems send us wheeling through a vortex of strangeness. June 24, 2020 MUDDY MATTERHORN Poems 2009-2019 By Heather McHugh With its irreverence for what’s trending, Heather McHugh’s work fits into a longstanding tradition in American poetry, the tradition of not pledging allegiance to any particular aesthetic flag.
[An iron pan is burning; the witch]
An iron pan is burning; the witch has left her house. The children walk hand in hand through a forest of reagents. In the subterranean world, bolts of silk, yellow pills and moths the size of dinner plates. You said you wish to practice yoga with baby goats? The witch is back, pan still burning, the stars can’t wait for their sacrifice.
In Protest or Celebration, Four Poets Evoke a Sense of Endings
March 27, 2020 THE ABSURD MAN Poems By Major Jackson 104 pp. Norton. $26.95. In one of these poems, set at a bar in New York City, the speaker’s grown son asks him how he could have betrayed his family. His reply is simultaneously baffling and relatable: “I was disappearing.” The son shakes his head. “The Absurd Man,” Jackson’s erudite fifth collection, examines the contradictions and possibilities in our search for meaning.
Flammagenitus Strophes by Sandra Simonds
You pick me up late a viscous outflow from the volcanic ledge of my thinking. Me in my duplex-hunger, in my firestorm-astonished dress, the pattern of crisp asphalt, the pattern, simple condensed nuclei, against my dry lightning ache. You pick me up late and we drive through polyhedronated structures of sound and civics-minded lives, lives bearing fruit with no regard for the termination-tables recently made, vast ledgers of waste, of debits, of human trees.
Let's Make the Water Turn Black by Sandra Simonds
Let's Make Pyres of brush as anagram of spontaneous com- bustion, cloud filling with wind vectors, blasts of char in my a- orta, aerial fuels, how feelings are an anchor point on the aspect, a single tree, dead. You were the wild mech- anism of the vortex column ascending through a crown of pines and blinding the absolute forbs.
“April,” by Sandra Simonds
Audio: Read by the author. The red bird falls from the tree, lands on its head, rolls right back up on its feet. Hello, spring. Hello, sanity. Hello, trashfire century. Hello, wilted leaves and gothic vines. How are you doing today? I will water the thyme. I will make miniature succulents out of clay. I will bake you the most beautiful loaf of bread, eat half of it, and give the other half to whatever nothing I can find, pretend you are mine. Oh, how are you doing?
"Lindos, Greece" by Sandra Simonds
Maybe silence adds to the pain and maybe pain adds to the sea and maybe the sea is only a reflection of a ruin today where the mind is unable to make out how things used to be for us: complete, with deities, a kind of order. Oh never mind the ATMs scattered throughout the medieval town or the street art sprayed into the air that says Destroy what destroys you But I destroy myself; I destroy myself. Copyright © 2018 Sandra Simonds. Used with permission of the author.
“She steps into La Roue de la Fortune movie theater” by Sandra Simonds
She steps into La Roue de la Fortune movie theater off the Jersey Turnpike, buys a ticket, and so swiftly the waters roll above her instinctual visions: Plaza, Il Piazzo, creep of film over the sound of the words piano, purr, whisper across her neck, one door opens another, in the labyrinthine pitch to preserve order, the expulsion from Eden, the dark soda up her clear plastic straw, reels of rodents, popcorn, teenage workers, acne, blood and circulation turn to ice inside this mechanized...
“There was this bear cam” by Sandra Simonds
There was this bear cam on the Internet. It was pointed at a place called Katmai National Park, Alaska. A few years ago my friend sent me a link to it. I would watch it sometimes but I never saw any bears. Maybe it was bad luck because my friend said she saw bears. All I ever saw was the enormous river rushing and the tall pines in the background doing nothing. I mean, that was OK, of course.
“It’s going to hurt” by Sandra Simonds
So you drink tea in the morning instead of an entire carafe of coffee on their first sip of the sun The ringing taste of green tea or whatever the fuck kind of tea this is Describe to me in detail this so-called purification ritual I’ve never done it before My cells are exploding into a wasting lament This is the last time you will ever write On the other side of this swamp of dark water, a plane will crash The lone survivor will speak on the radio as you drive down Highway 27 In the middle...
THIS IS WHERE THEY PLANT CHEAP PINE
This is where they plant cheap pine. These kinds of trees don’t communicate with each other. This is not the ecology of the forest, it’s the ecology of a tree farm. They create and destroy themselves for us with no tie to the future or the past. They used to make turpentine here. A lot of workers tortured in the convict leasing programs. The company store was the only place to buy anything. You worked all day in the swamp, then you got yellow fever and died. Rollover hedges all the way to the horizon.
Six from Atopia
Speculative cobwebs embroidered with flowers back in the love garden of eternal truth, I am as unhurried as the smallest creature left to revel in its own zigzag.
The Self-Help Cookbook Said
by Sandra Simonds Your brain is broken and you need to go on a broken brain diet Okay This is normal it said We live in a polluted world and everything is dirty Okay You must understand how broken your brain is Okay Then the author was on YouTube jumping around like a maniac He was convincing I knew I had a problem My son said Mom I don’t know how you do it Cleaning up all the time like thisMy sister said it’s probably your thyroid But the self-help cookbook made me feel the best because it...
American Poetry Review - Sandra Simonds - "Poetry is Stupid and I Want to Die"
The one trick I’ve always fallen back on is to make a man think But it was so quiet in your room even if you had horrible books written by evil men at your bedside and in your possession that deep desire to hurt and thus in my head scrambling between kissing you and trying to maneuver how I would leave unharmed the way a woman has to manipulate both mind and body I dreamed I was in a car and a man hit me over the head Please don’t tell me the story of the graduate student who put a mouse in...
May 2017 | Poetry Magazine | Poetry Foundation
Alexander Stewart, "Silverlake Ribbon 3," 2016 The oldest monthly devoted to verse in the English-speaking world. From this Issue poem By Sandra Simonds When you think about it, mostly, a cage is air — so what is there to be afraid of? A cage of air. Baudelaire said Poe thought America was one giant cage. To the poet, a nation is one big cage? And isn’t the nation mostly filled... poem By Fred D'Aguiar “Ah neva seen this before in all ma years.” Testify, Sis.
8. I Love Wine!
This poem is one section of a long sequence, “The Baudelaire Variations,” named after the 19th-century French Symbolist poet who famously wrote: “You must always be drunk. ... But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.” Simonds seems to have taken his advice, becoming drunk on her capacity to make poetry through metaphor.
On Surmising | Boston Review
Did you stagger back to her or did you float Did you wheel into that decade once madly lost I stepped back from summer having forgotten having left behind the entanglements Now uneasy again as if all the complications were just around the corner and I wonder if you would allow me to visit so that I might look at you, asking Whose house Whose home Was anything ours Was night a long paralysis or was that a succession of days Did you notice the ditches filling with fog Or was that just rain...
"For Joe" | Ovation | columbiatribune.com
For JoeLocked in the beauty of the pearl, far from frail,these people who claim to love us stillthey don’t give up much, do they, sealed? To eradicate class —the looking glass of it, the complex glare: “Let me introducexxx, impoverished poet.” Winter let uplike a terrible religion. In its wake, a politics came,profane. You were on a trainfrom Philly to Mass.
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