Synopses & Reviews
Published by the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University
Winner of the 2014 Colorado Prize for Poetry, Supplice is the second installment in T. Zachary Cotler’s sonnet sequence that began with Sonnets to the Humans.These are amatory sonnets, but with love and rhyme tortured into broken and boneset textures. Supplice herself, the dark lady of these poems, is difficult to pin down with an epithet. Is she the angel of reality, banality, popular culture, pornography, uncertainty, or economic and environmental crisis? She has something to do with the history of cruelty and pain, with the devaluation of traditional ideas of beauty, and with the silence and science that have replaced divinity.
Review
In T. Zachary Cotlers
Supplice, humanisms dialectic is itself a primary form of torture. Working inside the circuitry of thesis-antithesis, self-other, the poems collected here answer no to Keatss questions in Ode on a Grecian Urn, confessing that truth / is beauty isnt true. In a world become word, the eternal present eternally fails / to be trapped, and our poet-pilgrim is bound by dueling
via negativa that chart the passage of
dailleurs or elsewhere, where he finds history has located meanings trajectory. A not-ready-for-remnant-sonnet sequence as chilling as it is tutelary.”
Claudia Keelan, final judge 2014 Colorado Prize for Poetry
The city on a hill is at war again, and this time not only with love. Cotlers terse lyrics of desirethe anatomies of elsewhereenact a baroque masque against backdrops of conflagrating violence. This is a difficult, encrusting lyricism, as of looted jewels.”
G. C. Waldrep
Synopsis
Published by the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University
Winner of the 2014 Colorado Prize for Poetry, "Supplice"is the second installment in T. Zachary Cotler s sonnet sequence that began with"Sonnets to the Humans."These are amatory sonnets, but with love and rhyme tortured into broken and boneset textures. Supplice herself, the dark lady of these poems, is difficult to pin down with an epithet. Is she the angel of reality, banality, popular culture, pornography, uncertainty, or economic and environmental crisis? She has something to do with the history of cruelty and pain, with the devaluation of traditional ideas of beauty, and with the silence and science that have replaced divinity."
About the Author
T. Zachary Cotler is the author of two books of poetry,
House with a Dark Sky Roof and
Sonnets to the Humans; a novel,
Ghost at the Loom; and a critical monograph,
Elegies for Humanism. His awards include the Sawtooth Prize and the Ruth Lilly Fellowship. He is a founding editor of
The Winter Anthology.