"In Sandra Simonds' poetry, a terrific, nihilistic dislike of herself and others (her heroine 'dires' men) vies with an extreme will to prevail in full color. The tension is sustained by an imagination of remarkable fertility and a rich and crowded verbal palette. Simonds writes to sting. She's like a Plath whose capacity for erotic altruism has thoroughly imploded, producing a crisis that only a brilliant talent could turn into a field of triumphantly exhibited power. Simonds has such a talent." --Cal Bedient

On the 50th anniversary of Ted Berrigan's and the 25th anniversary of Bernadette Mayer's, Bloof Books is thrilled to publish THE SONNETS by Sandra Simonds. As Simonds has written, "There's no consensus on how to do it. Does it have to have a traditional rhyme scheme? Does it need to be written in iambic pentameter? Does it have to be about unrequited love? Does it even need to be fourteen lines? Ask twenty poets these questions, and you'll get two-hundred answers. And simply calling a sonnet a sonnet doesn't really make it a sonnet." THE SONNETS is this poet's exploration of the tradition, as...