Monograph

SIMEON BERRY has been an associate editor for Ploughshares, and won a Massachusetts Cultural Council Individual Artist Grant and a Career Chapter Award from the National Society of Arts and Letters. His first book, Ampersand Revisited, won the 2013 National Poetry Series. He lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.

After inhaling Simeon Berry’s latest collection (and his second National Poetry Series win!), I admit I am a total sucker for the monograph (a detailed study of one relatively narrow topic), and Berry’s monographic treatment of his particular topic—which I absolutely will not give away here—in particular. 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.