Wolf Centos

Simone Muench grew up under the influence of Universal Horror films, Boone’s Farm, Southern Baptist sermons, and country roads. Recently the recipient of a 2013 NEA Poetry Fellowship and the Fall 2012 Black Lawrence Chapbook Award, some of her other honors include two Illinois Arts Council Fellowships, two Vermont Studio Center Fellowships, a 2013 Lewis Faculty Scholar Award, and the PSA’s Bright Lights Big Verse Award. In addition to serving as an editor for Sharkforum and chief faculty advisor for Jet Fuel Review, she is the author of four full-length collections: The Air Lost in Breathing (Marianne Moore Prize; Helicon Nine, 2000), Lampblack & Ash (Kathryn A. Morton Prize; Sarabande, 2005), Orange Crush (Sarabande, 2010), and Disappearing Address, co-written with Philip Jenks (BlazeVOX, 2010). She is an Associate Professor at Lewis University in Illinois.

"Muench’s brief fifth collection, composed of short poems all titled “Wolf Cento,” would not be out of place beside “True Blood,” “Twilight” (or Team Jacob, anyway) and other popular fantasies of escaped inner monsters. Muench employs the cento, a poetic form in which all the language is taken from other poets’ poems. . . . Muench’s wolf is a bit like Ted Hughes’s crow: menacing, weirdly sexy and open to interpretation."—New York Times Book Review"Simone Muench’s Wolf Centos possesses near-invisible sutures and an uncanny smoothness in its fusion of parts. With an ear tuned to a minor key, Muench creates an integral and potent voice that sings of the 'wood-world’s torn despair.'"—Boston Review“Simone Muench has stitched together a new creature out of scraps and vital organs she gathered in the boneyard. It lives. It leaps. It bounds. It’s at your window tonight. Too late for you, sweetheart.”—Daniel Handler“Simone Muench’s poetry has always had about it a kind of personal urgency, the sense that image and lyric fully realized offer the self its best landscape. . . . Her wolf is complex and protean, a familiar, whose howl inhabits and enables the articulate explorations of these powerful poems.”—Michael Anania"Reading this book, I wanted cento to mean what it means in quattrocento. I wanted the book to last a century, a cycle. But also to name a period of social and aesthetic transformation. Perhaps we “played the wolf or the witch”; perhaps we were punished for these things, for the ways we had of being against the social. This book’s cunning is that it makes this idea in the most social way, from the storehouse of language. But I hear in it the realization that we must be against the social absolutely, if this present world is ever to pass away; we must go forward into the wolf century, and I want this book with me."—Joshua Clover"Muench . . . successfully restricts herself to the cento form in her fifth collection, repurposing the lines and fragments of other writers. . . . [she] manages to amplify her own creative power through the megaphone of literary history as she cobbles together a series of modern, sensual, and urgent short poems that howl about self, desire, and song."—Publishers Weekly

• 1.[I saw my life a wolf loping along the road][Sea-blue, shot through][I transformed into this thing, this beautiful][Outside the new world winters in grand dark][Very quick. Very intense, like a wolf at a live heart][When tenderness seems tired][Who will take the madness from the trees?][Stunned by gold, we see coming][In the space of a half-open gold door][We: spectators, always, everywhere][In moon-swallowed shadows][Under somber firs two wolves mingled][Desire discriminates & language][It was a desire rather than a boat][There are wolves in the next room]2.[I have lost my being in so many beings][A stranger’s coming past][Nothing remains of you. The city][From this bleak hotel, & at the bored][Like a blue-blooded corona, I knocked][All song of the woods is crushed][After the first snow has fallen to its squalls][No cause you should weep, Wolf][Here in this town, in a glass honeycomb][Everything in these parts is geared[How long have I left you?—played the wolf][Beyond the baying of a snow wolf][Having erased all the past like a false eye][Cripple of light opening against my back][A year ago we all flushed a little brighter][The wolf licks her cheeks with][They promised me a silence][First frost blackens with a cloven hoof]3.[I have looked too long into human eyes][I dream you into being—mongering wolf][With flowers in their lapels, nine][November stands at the door.][You hear things. I see them. ][I watch my life running away][There is a wolf in me, sound][Everyone in the room wore white masks][All night the wolves danced][Shrewd wolf of dark innocence][In the yellow chalk of my diminishing bones][I want to be strung up and singled out][What do we leave, living]