Ampersand Revisited: National Poetry Series

"Simeon Berry is an alchemist. He unlatches memory from time; transforms the cold silence of observation into flashing thought. Here, boxed moments are packed and unpacked, shuffled and re-inhabited. Berry revisits his personal history with both inscription and divination, in an attempt to bring his understanding into the present tense. In Ampersand Revisited, the blueprints of the past are still being drawn, and time is no longer obligated to keep its promise of inflexibility."

—Richard Siken

"In Ampersand Revisited, Simeon Berry offers up a poetic bildungsroman of dazzling brio and brash inventiveness, a worthy successor to some of the great contemporary efforts in this mode: one hears echoes, among others, of Lowell’s Life Studies, Hejinian’s My Life and Brainard’s I Remember. Like these works, it is a work of formal risk-taking, of pathos alternating with wry humor, and, ultimately, of self-regard transfiguring to a hard-won self-awareness. Debut collections as accomplished at this are a very rare thing indeed."

—David Wojahn

Simeon Berry has been an Associate Editor for Ploughshares, and won a Massachusetts Cultural Council Individual Artist Grant and a Career Chapter Award from the National Society of Arts and Letters. His work has appeared in Crazyhorse, AGNI, Colorado Review, Blackbird, DIAGRAM, The Iowa Review, American Letters & Commentary, and many other journals. His second book, Monograph, won the 2014 National Poetry Series (University of Georgia Press). He lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.