Underground Facility - Softcover

Simons, C E J

Softcover

ISBN 10: 4907359241 ISBN 13: 9784907359249

Publisher: Isobar Press, 2018

Synopsis

In Underground Facility, as in C. E. J. Simons’s first Isobar collection, imagined afterlives of Shakespearean characters bridge past and present: Oberon and Puck turn investment bankers, Gonzalo is deaf to the plight of Mediterranean refugees, while Sycorax might be an embodiment of the laws of thermodynamics. However, the earlier book’s refusal to anthropomorphize nature now gives way to symbolic representations of human life and history through animal portraits – a glass frog as a devoted father, hermit crabs as sex addicts, a grasshopper as an interplanetary missionary. Moreover, in place of celebrating poetic self-effacement, Underground Facility grapples with autobiography: poems about grandfathers, fathers, mothers and sisters engage with how we build ourselves out of inherited fragments, rituals, superstitions, and conflicts.

About this title

About the Author

C. E. J. Simons is Senior Associate Professor of British Literature at International Christian University, Tokyo. He holds a D.Phil in British Romanticism from Lincoln College, Oxford, and in 2003 was the Harper-Wood Student in Creative Writing at St John's College, Cambridge. He has received prizes for individual poems and pamphlets in contests including the Cardiff International Poetry Competition and the Wigtown Competition. His criticism and poetry have appeared in the Independent, Isis, Magma, New Internationalist, Oxford Poetry, and The Times Literary Supplement.

Edition details

• Publisher: Isobar Press
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 4907359241
• ISBN 13: 9784907359249
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 142