About the Book
A fierce, visionary book-length poem
Burning Oracle is a visionary, book-length poem told from the fractures of a world on fire where myth, memory, and contemporary life collide. Cassandra—seer, mother, survivor—wanders through forests of digital noise and historical trauma, her voice both ancient and urgently new. At the heart of the poem is a pilgrimage to the grave of poet Paul Celan where she traces personal loss within the wider context of inherited trauma—particularly the Holocaust—and seeks meaning in the act of remembering. As floods rise and fires rage, the personal and historical ignite a mythic voice. Through the commonplace of stained dresses, shattered screens, and supermarket aisles, Cassandra encounters figures like Goya, Reynard the fox, and Celan himself, weaving their stories into an intertextual, image-rich landscape. Burning Oracle is a feminist reckoning, a personal mythography, and a testament to the power of poetry to animate the archive of history, memory, and everyday life.
[sample poem]
*
From II
No source, my Seine,
a German one instead,
Sixteen & reading Hölderlin's
Der Rhein at the foot of a massive
statue of Goethe and Schiller.
Stupid anorexic American girl.
But not really American.
And not really French.
And not really Turkish.
And not really Syrian.
And not really Spanish.
And the tourists at the camp.
Was I a tourist?
Squeal of the cassette
tape rewinding
Pink Floyd's The Wall.
Ah, when you speak German,
no one can tell
you're American. When you speak
English no one can tell
you're French. Too sick to go on.
Anne of Green Gables Figurines.
I'm always too sick
to go on, that's
my charm—a gray
ruin turned maroon
turned black.
*
It is easier to go mad,
Francisco says,
than one might think.
Easy to lose things.
People too.
Perhaps too easy.
Step inside
and you may not
come back.
He listed the colors he liked:
Black.
Black.
Black.
Black.
He told himself
to stay inside the painting
of the chartreuse river,
stay inside, Reader,
and he found his arms
roping and looping
into Cassandra
holding a tray
of dead pigeons.
Table of Contents:
On Reynard
I. On Cassandra
II. The Unknown Woman Of The Seine On Francisco Goya
III. On Paul Celan
IV. Acknowledgements
About the Author :
SANDRA SIMONDS is professor of English [SS2] and Humanities at Thomas University and the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently, Triptychs (Wave Books, November 2022). Her poetry, criticism, and creative nonfiction have been published in the New Yorker, The New York Times, Best American Poetry, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Chicago Review, Granta, Boston Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere.
Review :
"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
