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Winner of the 2004 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry
Selected by Carol Muske–Dukes
"What Muench does in these poems is what, in fact, all poets purport to do—that is to say, talk to the dead, let the dead speak—then offer answers. . . . [T]hese hermetic yet direct poems. . . speak to the reader like high-speed oracles. . . . The depth of identification with mastery, with enormous grief and enormous optimism and joy, becomes her force field." —from the Introduction by Carol Muske-Dukes
"Simone's poems have a confidence and sophistication of what I like to call intentionality. Also wit, grace, poise, and a relationship to writing beyond self-referential feeling. The language is refreshing, musical, attenuated. The literary, cultural references wake us up. This seems a writer inspired by
Other. . . . There is an evocative marriage taking place here. Her poems display a highly engaged imagination." —Anne Waldman
"Lush, sprouting sensuous images line-by-line, adopting myth freely, Simone
Muench's poems are volatile explosives, circling beauty." —James Tate
With language rich in lexical range and internal rhyme, Simone Muench's poems can bring to mind the early work of Sylvia Plath. Like Plath, her images are often beautiful—"The river carries stars. / Fish bones flicker / beneath the surface / littered with trout silk / and snow." Again and again in these pages an incantatory but intimate voice summons the palpable textures of the world to the page: "Water on skin, he glistens / with indecision." And though Muench's work is nearly as informed (and transformed) by myth and prosodic resource as Plath's, it is also lighter, less armored, and more open to the bracing effects of satire and postmodern self–awareness. In poems that explore the layered dangers of sexual love, and/or lust, Lampblack & Ash is a compendium of pleasures for the eye and ear, as well as for the restless heart.
Simone Muench is poetry editor of Another Chicago Magazine. She has poems published or forthcoming in Notre Dame Review, Poetry, Indiana Review, The Paris Review, The Bellingham Review, and POOL. Her book, The Air Lost in Breathing, received the Marianne Moore Prize for Poetry from Helicon Nine in 2000. New Michigan Press released her chapbook, Notebook. Knife. Mentholatum., in 2003. Currently, she is Assistant Professor at Lewis University as well as a doctoral student at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Recently, she was one of the Fine Lines winners co-sponsored by Olay and the Poetry Society of America; her winning poem will appear as part of the Poetry in Motion series. You can visit her website at: www.simonemuench.com.
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