Description: Simultaneously a scathing critique of consumer culture and a heartbreakingly manic narrative of obsession and reckoning.
Review Quotes:
"Simonds' sonnets are uncaged, snarling, rooting creatures, ferreting about the mind like it's a shoebox of memorabilia. These sonnets execute that mysterious task which only poems can: expose the connective roots of memories, objects, and beings, despite how dissonant the universe can feel."--Publishers Weekly
"How do you write poems while caring for children, teaching composition, and trying to make rent? How do you think about--for example--domestic violence, Bikram Yoga, and being in love, all at once? The world is an exhausting place full of unsustainable contradictions; the sonnet holds some parts of it uncomfortably, energetically, together."--Boston Review
"Steal It Back will not let us forget our own complicity in building a soulless society. The juxtaposition of priceless works of art with our shoddy, big-box store culture generates an anger that is the book's main power. Simonds's style is direct, her sentences both sharp-edged and fragile in their rawness."--Miami Rail