Trace - Paperback

by Simone Muench (Author)

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."

Author Biography

Simone Muench is the author of "The Air Lost in Breathing" (Helicon Nine, 2000), winner of the Marianne Moore Prize for Poetry; "Lampblack & Ash" (Sarabande, 2005) winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize for Poetry; "Orange Crush" (Sarabande, 2010); and "Disappearing Address," co-written with Philip Jenks (BlazeVOX, 2010). She is an editor for "Sharkforum" and chief faculty advisor for "Jet Fuel Review." Some of her honors include a 2013 NEA fellowship, two Illinois Arts Council Fellowships, residency fellowships to VSC and Yaddo, a Lewis Faculty Scholar Award, UIC's Frederick Stern Award for Teaching, the 2012 Fall Black Lawrence Press Chapbook Award for "Trace," and the PSA's Bright Lights Big Verse Award. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and is an associate professor at Lewis University where she teaches creative writing and film studies.