Description: "A book-length poem in four parts, uses a selection of mythological and historical characters-Cassandra from Greek mythology, Reynard the medieval fox, artist Francisco Goya, and poet Paul Celan-to explore factual data points versus inner knowing"-- Provided by publisher.
Review Quotes:
"Burning Oracle is expansive and explosive in its form and psychological terrain. Partly a literary biography, partly a love story, and partly a personal reckoning, Sandra Simonds has created a porous, fresh way of making a long poem. A fluid-like curved lyric form is spliced with several list poems, and both try to witness the invisible. Bursting with allusions, the voices in these poems are part of a lineage of prophets and visionaries. Burning Oracle bleeds out of itself into the whole world."--Sean Singer, author of Today in the Taxi
"In a Sandra Simonds poem, anything can happen. Burning Oracle mashes together Reynard the Fox, Celan, Cassandra, Goya, epigenetics, the speaker's ex-boyfriends, and ancestors murdered in the Holocaust. Madcap exuberance collides with rich intertextuality, as the poet augurs the end of civilization.'I'm nothing but green lightning, ' she warns, 'a psychic conduit.'"--Michael Dumanis, author of Creature
"With the intimacy and narrative grip of memoir, Sandra Simonds's Burning Oracle gives lasting shape to the movement of a mind as it sifts through historical and personal trauma one minute before contemplating the ecstatic possibilities of consciousness and the inexhaustible mystery of oneself in relation to others the next. Always on the move and always mindful of how media denature and metabolize experience ('beware the machine for it will extract / your story from you--all things reduced / to tags and pixels'), this bold new book by Simonds--who can always be trusted to match her exacting intellect with an instinct for formal flair--presents a rangy, creaturely, digestion-resistant text that is faithful to the inner life's quicksilver complexity, a 'language fused into itself / like an ebony box of vibration.'"--Timothy Donnelly, author of Chariot
"Because laments are often grounded in yearning or sorrow, turning to Sandra Simonds's Burning Oracle I gain a sense of both deep conditions, particularly wedded in an archival vibrancy. These poems of sorrow declare, 'shoot me / a picture/of your lament.' A deep sharing of a sensorial grief sweeps us into Simonds's industrious thinking and doing: the devices in the textual that urge and usher forth new discourses. Poems seem to write themselves into the circular space of thinking: 'now I understand / what that means, to / have to carry / a story from one / country to the next' Her 'next' is how to teach into the holocaust literature and poetics that are also inside of one's lineage--all the real devastation of the past imprinted into the present. These poems anchor us in their purposes, their subsequent moods, and propel us into the most essential laments of selfhood."--Prageeta Sharma, author of Grief Sequence and Onement Won