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.
