"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
Author Biography:
Simone Muench is the author of six full-length books including Lampblack & Ash (Sarabande, 2005), Orange Crush (Sarabande, 2010), Wolf Centos (Sarabande, 2014), and SUTURE, a collaborative book of sonnets written with Dean Rader, (Black Lawrence Press, 2017). Her chapbook TRACE received the Black River Award (Black Lawrence Press, 2014). She is a recipient of a 2013 NEA fellowship and the 2014 Meier Foundation for the Arts Achievement Award, which recognizes artists for their innovation, achievements and community contributions. She received her PhD from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and is Professor of English at Lewis University where she teaches creative writing and film studies and serves as chief faculty advisor for Jet Fuel Review. Dean Rader's Works & Days, won the 2010 T. S. Eliot Prize, and Landscape Portrait Figure Form (Omnidawn, 2014) was a Barnes & Noble Review Best Poetry Book of the Year. He is the editor of 99 Poems for the 99 Percent: An Anthology of Poetry and the winner of the 2015 George Bogin Award from the Poetry Society of America. A new collection, Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry, is forthcoming in 2016 from Copper Canyon. Rader writes and reviews regularly for The San Francisco Chronicle, The Rumpus, The Huffington Post, and The Kenyon Review. He is a professor at The University of San Francisco, where he won the university's distinguished research award in 2011. Poems co-written with Simone Munech from the Frankenstein Sonnet series that will appear in SUTURE (Black Lawrence Press, 2017) have appeared or will appear in American Poetry Review, Blackbird, Zyzzyva, Handsome, The Economy, Columbia Poetry Review, New American Writing, DMQ, Dusie, and many others and have been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net Awards.
