The Shakespearean Sonnet

By Laurie L.C. Lewis

The durable and magical Shakespearean sonnet is an excellent avenue to learning how to write in form. My four MFA students wrote 28 sonnets in one semester. I was so impressed by my students' sonnets that I published four by each of them in this collection.

Little did I know that his BA in Percussion Music would make Christian Chase Garner a natural metricist. As his bio states, Chase cooks, and his sonnets are like a tour of cuisine. Though "November's Start" has no food, I like the portrait of a child as a budding artist, and the metapoetic effects of carving in wood and a handprint in cement.

The sonnets by Kari Moss are marked by an oracular voice, unusual for any poet, but especially a young poet. It's a voice that makes me want to believe in hell, heaven, the Lord. Then there's a line I find hard to believe: "And underneath this veil, I am a whore." Followed by a line I definitely believe: "But in my mind, just look at what I store."

DeAnn Jordan's sonnets express a "fire queen" cosmic passion, with heartbreaking and fierce sonnets that generate both tears and chills in the reader. She deftly and swiftly, in 14 lines, creates novelistic characters and stories, including an ekphrastic sonnet that captures Sherlock Holmes perfectly. But the leap into pure poetry happens with this ending of a sonnet: "I was also gone."

If you love music in poems, read Samuel Jackson's sonnets, "stewed anew by sun and dew." His sonnets explore and question male territory through coaching, farming, fatherhood, and machinery, alert to compassion and emotional pain, observing telling details, expressing both regret and hope. These sonnets wonder whether tradition is best followed or broken.

-Mary Meriam

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0CQCZP61V
• ISBN13: 9798870851679
• Release Date: December 2023
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 38 Pages
• Weight: 0.14 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.1" x 6.0" x 9.0"