Disappearing Address

Poetry. This collaboration feels entirely seamless, as though it were not a collaboration at all but the work of a single, virtuoso poet with a very broad range of imagery and a finely tuned sense of how diction can coalesce varied materials. There is some of the surreal bounce we expect of collaboration but very little in the way of bipolar diffusion or poetic jiu-jitsu contending egos can produce. This is wonderfully contemplative work, and though it's hard to tell when Muench might begin or Jenks end, there is throughout, but particularly in the sequence addressed as letters to poets, a broadened set of concerns about poetry, especially, that these two poets seem to have negotiated in the act of joint (or should I say, mutual) composition. A genuinely wonderful collection--Michael Anania.

About the Author :
Simone Muench was raised in small Louisiana towns and the Ozarks in Arkansas. She is the author of The Air Lost in Breathing (Marianne Moore Prize for Poetry; Helicon Nine, 2000), Lampblack & Ash (Kathryn A. Morton Prize for Poetry; Sarabande, 2005), and Orange Crush (Sarabande, 2010). She has been a recipient of a two Illinois Arts Council Fellowships, a VSC Fellowship, the 49th Parallel Award for Poetry, the Charles Goodnow Award, the AWP Intro Journals Project Award, the Poetry Center's Annual Juried Reading Award, and the PSA's Bright Lights/Big Verse Prize. She received her Ph.D from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and is director of the writing program at Lewis University where she teaches creative writing and film studies. Currently, she serves on the advisory board for Switchback Books and UniVerse: A United Nations of Poetry, and is an editor for Sharkforum. Philip Jenks was born in the south, grew up in Appalachia and came alive in the Pacific Northwest. Now he's haunting Chicago. His poems have appeared in Chicago Review, Typo, FENCE, Cultural Society, H_NGM_N, Canarium, LVNG, and elsewhere. He has published two full-length volumes of poetry, ON THE CAVE YOU LIVE IN (Flood Editions, 2002) and MY FIRST PAINTING WILL BE THE ACCUSER (Zephyr Press, 2005). He also published two chapbooks--The Elms Left Elm Street (Plane Bukt, 1994) and How Many of You Are You? (Dusie, 2006). His collaboration with Simone Muench, Little Visceral Carnival, was published by Cinemateque Press, 2009. He also collaborated with Sasha Miljevic, publishing Distance, an ekphrastic hybrid of prose and poetry (Dutch Art Institute, 2009). He recently completed his third manuscript, Colony Collapse.