Winner of the 2014 National Poetry Series
Selected by Denise Duhamel
Sample Poems:
Reviews:
The Literary Review (Jake Bauer)
American Micro-Reviews and Interviews (Carleen Tibbetts)
The Critical Flame (Nora Delaney)
The Washington Independent Review of Books (Grace Cavalieri)
Praise:
“If you enjoyed Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and Eula Biss’s The Balloonists, you will love Berry’s Monograph—obsessive, prismed, wise, shameless—a whole treatise of desire formatted into tiny succulent prose poems or lyrical fictions or bites or bits or installments or glances or confessions: a collage of lovely and disturbing threads. I simply could not put it down.” —Maureen Seaton
“With Monograph, Simeon Berry has found a new and compelling way of doing what presents, rather slyly, as autobiography. By turns acerbic, self mocking, and gently witty, this book is made of lucid, startling sequences of squibs, or tabs, of narrative fragments about sex, love, family, books, and writing. Mostly what I wanted to do in this blurb was quote my favorite bits—look at this, look at this—but there are too many of them. Smart detail, sudden skids, Big Questions, casual idiomatic precision: Monograph has all of these, but I think it’s the quality of Berry’s attention that is most arresting of all. A book of wit and heart.” —Daisy Fried
“Monograph is one poet’s primary research on all things love—the erotic, the domestic, love’s glory, and its accompanying rage. Simeon Berry’s voice is irresistibly authentic, even at its most crafty. . . . ‘There are things I’ve done to make the story better . . . the girl with the skull and crossbones hearing aid. . . .’ This poet writes what everyone else (or, at least, many of us) are thinking regarding the morality of memoir. ‘Everything you are talking about are open secrets. She wants you to feel like you’re handing over the nuclear launch codes or something.’ Smart and also wise, Berry’s poems are stripped bare of ornamentation and read like columns of pure light.” —Denise Duhamel
“Do you enjoy the idea of New England fishermen who cannot swim? I do very much. ‘These are the people I come from,’ Simeon Berry writes early on, and proceeds to show us a man whose intelligence is the raft he clings to as his relationship falls apart. I like this too – ‘my brain is my business’ – because it’s so simply and oddly true: whatever a poet writes about, the real subject is the poet’s mind. And I’m surprised and entertained by the mind that shows up on these pages. There’s a quality of invention here I love, the feeling of wonderful traffic between what’s real and what’s made up, from a poet who understands that the self is, in large part, a mythology we create. This is a fun, weird, and quietly harrowing book. I hope one of many to come.” —Bob Hicok
“By turns hardcore and hilarious, reading Monograph is like experiencing the minutiae and mythology of a long-term relationship through the slits of a zoetrope: the inside jokes, the ghosts, the tics and tantrums that make us fall in and out of love. A sly treatise on gender relationships and literary disclosure, this book will slap you, pet you, tell you it’s sorry, it will never do it again, but it will. I never wanted it to stop.” —Karyna McGlynn