What if all women try to Steal It Back? America, art, life. They're in Sephora, on Twitter, at McDonald's. They're single mothers and teachers, Catholic schoolgirls and martyrs. And they're all stealing it back. Sylvia Plath gets a Malibu beach house. Lady Gaga hatches from an egg of triumph. They're hovering between the tax collectors and the Romantics, between Florida's lakes and every lavish thing in seventeenth-century France. Steal It Back journeys through America's factories, its Bed...

"If Coleridge, Plath, Ovid, and Celan started a love commune where they built a manifesto Molotov cocktail out of the pastoral, eros, blank verse, and kitsch: it would be this book. A true original, thrilling in her brash complex feminism and virtuosic in sound and line, Simonds writes of the lives and desires trod upon by late capitalism and poetry." -Carmen Giménez Smith, 2015 Akron Poetry Prize judge

Burning Oracle is a visionary, book-length poem told from the fractures of a world on fire where myth, memory, and contemporary life collide. Cassandra—seer, mother, survivor—wanders through forests of digital noise and historical trauma, her voice both ancient and urgently new. At the heart of the poem is a pilgrimage to the grave of poet Paul Celan where she traces personal loss within the wider context of inherited trauma—particularly the Holocaust—and seeks meaning in the act ...

Atopia grapples with the political climate of the United States manifested through our everyday lives. Sandra Simonds charts the formations and deformations of the social and political through the observations of the poem's speakers, interspersed with the language of social media, news reports, political speech, and the dialogue of friends, children, strangers, and politicians. The Los Angeles Review of Books characterized Simonds's work as "robust, energetic, fanciful, e...

The Winter 2015-16 issue of Ploughshares. Ploughshares is an award-winning journal of new writing. Two out of each year's three issues are guest-edited by prominent writers who explore different personal visions, aesthetics, and literary circles, with the Winter issue staff-edited.The stories, poems, and essays that comprise this staff-edited issue of Ploughshares are diverse and timely. Visit a South African laundromat in Laurie Baker’s short story, Here I Am, Laughing with Boers;...

***This book was read in its entirety, in front of a live audience at Jack Straw Cultural Center, Seattle, March 2023.***With breathtaking fervor, Sandra Simonds delivers an extended address to Orlando, which stands as both a city marked by vibrant promises fallen into betrayals and abuses and the specter of a past lover. Developing a series of recurring episodes and detailing an intricate network of relationships entangled in love, pain, anger, and compas...

The prestigious and highly anticipated annual anthology of the best Canadian and international poetry from the 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist.Each year, the best books of poetry published in Canada and internationally in English are honoured with the Griffin Poetry Prize, one of the world’s richest literary awards. Since 2001, this annual prize has spurred interest in and recognition of poetry, focusing worldwide attention on the formidable talent of poets.

In Corey Van Landingham’s Antidote, love equates with disease, valediction is a contact sport, the moon is a lunatic, and someone is always watching. Here the uncanny coexists with the personal, so that each poem undergoes making and unmaking, is birthed and bound in an acute strangeness. Elegy is made new by a speaker both heartbreaking and transgressive. Van Landingham reveals the instability of self and perception in states of grief; she is not afraid to tip the world upside do...

The mesmerizing bestseller that combines the storytelling gifts of Donna Tartt and the suspense of Alfred Hitchcock—A New York Times Ten Best Book of the YearSpecial Topics in Calamity Physics is a darkly hilarious coming-of-age tale and a richly plotted suspense story, told with dazzling intelligence and wit. At the center of the novel is clever, deadpan Blue van Meer, who has a head full of literary, philosophical, scientific, and cinematic know...

A collection of the year's best essays selected by André Aciman, author of the worldwide bestseller Call Me by Your Name."An essay is the child of uncertainty," André Aciman contends in his introduction to The Best American Essays 2020. "The struggle to write what one hopes is entirely true, and the long incubation every piece of writing requires of a writer who is thinking difficult thoughts, are what ultimately give the writing its depth, its ma...

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD • A beautifully written memoir-in-essays on fairy tales and their surprising relevance to modern life, from a Jewish woman raising Black children in the American South—based on her acclaimed Paris Review column “Happily”“One of the most inventive, phenomenally executed books I’ve read in decades.”—Kiese Laymon, author of HeavyFINALIST FOR THE SOUTHERN BOOK PRIZE...

From personal loss to phantom diseases, The Empathy Exams is a bold and brilliant collection, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction PrizeA Publishers Weekly Top Ten Essay Collection of Spring 2014Beginning with her experience as a medical actor who was paid to act out symptoms for medical students to diagnose, Leslie Jamison's visceral and revealing essays ask essential questions about our basic understanding of others: How shou...