Monograph: Poems

Written in narrow sections that blur the distinction between flash fiction and prose poetry, between memoir and meditation, Monograph veers from the elliptical to the explosive as it dissects the Gordian knot of a marriage’s intellectual, sexual, and domestic lives. Invoking Raymond Chandler, Pythagoras, Joan Didion, and Virginia Woolf as presiding spirits, Simeon Berry curates the negative space of each wry tableau, destabilizing the high seriousness of every lyric aside and slipping quantum uncertainty into the stark lineaments of loss. "Monograph is one poet's primary research on all things love—the erotic, the domestic, love's glory, and its accompanying rage. Simeon Berry's voice is irresistibly authentic, even at its most crafty. . . . 'There are things I've done to make the story better . . . the girl with the skull and crossbones hearing aid. . . .' This poet writes what everyone else (or, at least, many of us) are thinking regarding the morality of memoir. 'Everything you are talking about are open secrets. He wants you to feel like you're handing over the nuclear launch codes or something.' Smart and also wise, Berry's poems are stripped bare of ornamentation and read like columns of pure light." —Denise Duhamel ?If you enjoyed Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and Eula Biss’s The Balloonists, you will love Berry’s Monograph—obsessive, prismed, wise, shameless—a whole treatise of desire formatted into tiny succulent prose poems or lyrical fictions or bites or bits or installments or glances or confessions: a collage of lovely and disturbing threads. I simply could not put it down.' —Maureen Seaton, author of Fibonacci Batman: New and Selected Poems, 1991–2011 ?With Monograph, Simeon Berry has found a new and compelling way of doing what presents, rather slyly, as autobiography. By turns acerbic, self-mocking, and gently witty, this book is made of lucid, startling sequences of squibs, or tabs, of narrative fragments about sex, love, family, books, and writing. Mostly what I wanted to do in this blurb was quote my favorite bits—look at this, look at this—but there are too many of them. Smart detail, sudden skids, Big Questions, casual idiomatic precision: Monograph has all of these, but I think it’s the quality of Berry’s attention that is most arresting of all. A book of wit and heart.' —Daisy Fried, author of My Brother Is Getting Arrested Again SIMEON BERRY has been an associate editor for Ploughshares and won a Massachusetts Cultural Council Individual Artist Grant and a Career Chapter Award from the National Society of Arts and Letters. His first book, Ampersand Revisited, was selected for the 2013 National Poetry Series. He lives in Somerville, Massachusetts. Cover design: Erin Kirk New Cover illustration: Author photo: Fritz Ward The University of Georgia Press Athens, Georgia 30602 www.ugapress.org ISBN 978-0-8203-4845-2