sonnets Archive

Bernadette Mayer’s Deconstructed Sonnets

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As formalism in poetry and the expectations around gender and family structure have evolved, so have poets’ treatment of it. Bernadette Mayer's 1989 collection repurposes the idea of the volta in experimental sonnets to demonstrate that clear resolution in life rarely exists, especially in matters of love and relationship.

Review: ORBIT by Cynthia Zarin

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The volume has its own points of gravity that, comet-like, it revisits as it moves forward.

Review: THE AFTER PARTY by Jane Prikryl

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Jana Prikryl’s The After Party is one of those rare debut volumes, like Stevens’s Harmonium, in which we meet an already fully-inhabited voice. In some such cases, much unforeseeable development may be in store, as with Graham’s Hybrids of Plants and Ghosts; sometimes, as with Delmore Schwartz’s In Dreams

“Ghosts Usually Accompany Me through My Poems”: An Interview with Diane Seuss

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Words just seem to have more possibilities in the poems of Diane Seuss. They become more flexible, more magnetic, attracting and accumulating meaning and music in a speedy rush to surprise, a hard-won clarity about what it’s like to be here, be human. Diane is the author of three

“You start out in difficulty”: An Interview with Dan Albergotti

Dan Albergotti is the author of two books of poems, The Boatloads (BOA Editions, 2008) and Millennial Teeth (Southern Illinois University Press, 2014), as well as a limited-edition chapbook, The Use of the World (Unicorn Press, 2013). A graduate of the MFA program at UNC Greensboro and former poetry

The Formal Imagination of Oulipo

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Founded in 1960 by a collective of French mathematicians and writers, Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Workshop of Potential Literature), or Oulipo, was established to identify new forms of writing using numerical and alphabetical constraints. Early member Georges Perec, for example, structured his novel Life A User’s Manuel according to