Two more sonnets from Sandra!

Everyday Genius is featuring two sonnets from Sandra Simonds' upcoming House of Ions today, in the August issue guest-edited by Elisa Gabbert.

A snippet...

You are my ounce, my octagon, my omen, ornate

      as palm leaf shadow curing the chlorinated waters

of the nuclear family’s backyard swimming pool. 

They own the world, do they not?  You are my zero sum game,

      my tribe, sailboat catching its cloth lip on the torn horizon. 

Go read the rest. 

Poetic labor: still reading!

"Utopian Slumps" by Ed Ruscha. Pastels on paper, 1981.
They Called Her Styrene (Phaidon, 2000)

We're still reading your chapbooks, conferring.

We should be able to get through the rest of them this week, and expect to be able to make notifications after folks are back from the long Labor Day weekend.

Then we will announce what we've chosen, once the poets have confirmed.

We are very grateful that you have shared your work with us, and it's been very exciting reading these. We got more than we expected, which pleases us too!

More soon. Just wanted to give you an update.

Update to the update, September 6: We have finished reading, but are now re-reading the "finalists" and conferring one more time. Announcement next week.

Sandra Simonds is blogging for The Best American Poetry this week!

From her first post, "Notes on the birth of my daughter (and poetry)":

Being a poet is kind of like being a good detective. Taking mental notes on what was happening to my body, mind and environment during and after the hemorrhage allowed me to distance myself from my own experience and helped me cope during what has been one of the scariest and loneliest experiences of my life. During my blood transfusions, I thought, “I need to write a poem about getting a blood transfusion while watching the Leon County Spelling Bee on TV” and “No, wait! I need to write a dramatic monologue in the voice of a BLOOD CELL entering another person’s body.” When Ezekiel, my three-year old son, came to visit me, I thought, “I need to write a poem about TOWERS and I have to incorporate the fact that he keeps calling the hospital “mommy’s tower” into the poem. And that reminded me of going on a field trip to Watts Towers when I was a little girl growing up in Los Angeles and then that reminded me of how I was in Dante class in graduate school when the Twin Towers fell and isn’t this a little bit like being in a circle of hell and if it is, which circle, and more importantly, which way to PARADISE? Auden is right when he says, “poets are tough and can profit from the most dreadful experiences.”

Read the rest here. And check back daily for more.