Muench, S: Suture

Simone Muench is the author of Lampblack & Ash (Kathryn A. Morton Prize for Poetry and NYT Editor's Choice; Sarabande, 2005), Orange Crush (Sarabande, 2010), DISAPPEARING ADDRESS with Philip Jenks (BlazeVOX books, 2010), Wolf Centos (Sarabande, 2014), HEX & HOWL with Jackie K. White (Black Lawrence Press, 2021), TRACE won the Black River Chapbook Competition (Black Lawrence, 2014), and SUTURE, with Dean Rader (Black Lawrence, 2017). She co-edited the anthology They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing (Black Lawrence, 2018). Her honors include an NEA fellowship, three Illinois Arts Council fellowships, the Marianne Moore Prize for Poetry, and residency fellowships to Yaddo, Artsmith, and VSC. In 2014, she was awarded the Meier Foundation for the Arts Achievement Award, which recognizes artists for innovation, achievements, and community contributions. She received her PhD from the University of Illinois and is a professor of English at Lewis University where she teaches creative writing and film studies. Currently, she serves as faculty advisor for Jet Fuel Review, as a senior poetry editor for Tupelo Quarterly, and creator of the HB Sunday Reading Series.

"The endurance of the sonnet sequence over the centuries is in no small measure due to a paradox: it is a form that revels both in its fluidity and in its structural exactitude. The sonnet sequence is also apt to engage us because it is typically an expression of solitary yearning, just like the blues. Petrarch longs for his unattainable Laura; Son House laments his dead beloved. In SUTURE, Simone Muench and Dean Rader turn this latter convention of the sonnet sequence on its head, transforming a mode that seems predicated on an essential loneliness into a collaborative effort, one that is rambunctious, wry, companionable, jittery; and, above all, emotionally capacious. Muench and Rader write with an elegant but mysterious synchronicity-like octet and sextet."-David Wojahn