Sandra Simonds, Burning Oracle

 

Inside Cassandra,
      the book burned,
   her body flooded, burned.
Fires in July, floods in August,
drowned by October. A deer
                found the ashes
      in the river and laughed, ate
            them raw. The stag
      was hit by a car, and it snowed
  for the first time in Florida
      in two-hundred years.
     The people called it a strange
          white rain. It was a dream
      where I wrote my life
         story in the language
             of cirrus clouds, the sky
         cleared, could not be retold
in any ordinary sense of the word tale. (“I )”)

The latest from American poet and critic Sandra Simonds is Burning Oracle (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2026), following a cluster of chapbooks—including her Canadian debut, Combustible Mood (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2024) [see my review of such here]—and eight full-length titles including steal it back (Ardmore PA: Saturnalia Books, 2015) [see my review of such here] and Atopia (Wesleyan University Press, 2019) [see my review of such here]. The poems of Burning Oracle are composed as A kind of call-and-response, interspersing four numbered sections amid long, languid stretches of lyric thread—“On Reynard,” “On Cassandra,” “The Unknown Woman of the Seine,” “On Francisco Goya” and “On Paul Celan.”

Composed in the shadow of generational trauma via the Holocaust, family story and literature, Simonds articulates deep and dark book-length poem populated by figures that thread and weave through, into and around each other. “The clouds / have become / broomsticks / and upside- / down seahorses.” she writes, early on in the sequence. Hers is an endlessly articulate Cassandra, weaving through Paul Celan and Francisco Goya; weaving through devastation and trauma, old boyfriends and grief, European travel and the ghosts of allegory, empire, prophets and war. “Francisco considers / the difference / between melancholy / and sadness.” she writes, two-thirds through the collection. “John keats / suffered from melancholia, / which is a condition / that becomes apparent / when you’re too small / and don’t fit in.” She manages such particular, extended lyrics; how her array of sentences and phrases pile atop each other to form narratives that ebb and flow; line breaks of a thousand cuts, a spool of endless, articulate witness.