Trace

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.

Through these 26 haunting poems, which draw from sources ranging from Dante to Baudelaire to Berryman to Millay, Simone Muench reimagines the figure of the wolf and the cento form by interrogating the possibilities, limits, and interplay of language, the human animal, and the hungry landscapes of relationship and poetic homage. Muench's speakers confront their own darkness and mortality through flickers of wilderness and heat: "Tonight, the wolf is a solitary shadow / that spills between stone & revery / as bodies resume their boundaries. / ... / Facedown, I lick away the footprints." Through evocations of the animate self-wolf and human-Muench's traces leave behind a living heart, a mark in the snow. Lyrical, elliptical, and intertextual, TRACE looks fiercely into the animal dark to reveal "a vaulting sunrise, hissing salt."