Wolf Centos - by Simone Muench (Paperback)

About the Book

Poems structured by a wolf motif, concerned with death and beauty, urging us to retain our "wildness" as we age.

Book Synopsis

Wolf Centos is comprised of centos, a patchwork form that originated around the 4th century. The form is one which re-configures pre-existing poetic texts into new systems of imagery and ideas. The author is able to place poets in conversation with one another across centuries and across continents. Though the poems are explicitly sutured together by the motif of the wolf, they are also linked by other elements, particularly motifs of language, loss, desire, and transformation. Wolf Centos is ultimately elegiac as it oscillates between transformation and stasis, wildness and domesticity, death and beauty, damage and healing, because ultimately our lives constantly shift between these polarities as well. The ultimate knowledge of the poems is that as we age and experience loss, we must retain our "wildness"--the wolf's wilderness--inside us. In this way, the wolf becomes a symbol of a threshold, a transformative space.

Review Quotes

"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

About the Author

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.