Monograph

Written in narrow sections that blur the distinction between flash fiction and prose poetry, between memoir and meditation, Monograph veers from the elliptical to the explosive as it dissects the Gordian knot of a marriage’s intellectual, sexual, and domestic lives. Invoking Raymond Chandler, Pythagoras, Joan Didion, and Virginia Woolf as presiding spirits, Simeon Berry curates the negative space of each wry tableau, destabilizing the high seriousness of every lyric aside and slipping quantum uncertainty into the stark lineaments of loss.

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Selected by

Denise Duhamel
publisher

pages

96

Monograph

      Thought back to that first
October after moving to the city.
Both of us temping. Broke and
in debt. Barely able to afford the
rent on a basement efficiency
next to the elevator. Our sole
extravagance a bonsai tree stiff-
ening on the window.

      Fairly certain we were
doomed as a couple. Repeating
this to myself every night as I
walked home in darkness through
the close, suburban streets, the
smell of the sea infiltrating the
fog. Utterly ecstatic with rage.

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