Lindsay Turner Reviews Sandra Simonds's Orlando

In her assessment of Sandra Simonds's latest title, Orlando, Lindsay Turner writes, "Orlando resembles Woolf’s novel not only in name or image (an oak tree figures prominently in both works), but more significantly because of the breadth of its tumultuous visions of gender, place, and time." From there: 

Simonds, who is the author of five previous collections of poems — Further Problems with Pleasure, Steal It Back, The Sonnets, Mother Was a Tragic Girl, and Warsaw Bikini — lives in Tallahassee, Florida, and teaches at Thomas University, in Thomasville, Georgia. Her Orlando is an address to the city and a lover; it is a narrative of relationships, love, domestic violence, labor, parenting, and confessional self-exploration; finally, it is a meditation on epic, poetry, history, and fantasy.

In Woolf’s Orlando, there’s a scene in which, “as if to vent his agony somewhere,” the lovelorn Orlando “plunge[s] the quill so deep into the inkhorn that the ink [spurts] over the table.” Like the excess of emotion that is here less recollected in tranquility than it is immediately present, Simonds’s epic is a kinetic adventure. This Orlando is an exercise in the formal possibilities created by the explosive pressures of emotion, as well as the intrusive material pressures of contemporary life under capitalism. In this way, her collection gives the lie to certain visions of poetic work that position poetic form as outside or fundamentally alien to the structures of gender, power, and labor that impinge upon contemporary life. Instead — robust, energetic, fanciful, even baroque — Simonds’s form is a necessary counterforce. 

Read more at Los Angeles Review of Books.