S U T U R E :  T H E   F R A N K E N S T E I N   S O N N E T S
by Simone Muench + Dean Rader

SAMPLE FRANKENSTEIN SONNETS FROM SUTURE

• "The Beautiful American Word, Sure" featured in Verse Daily.
• [You thought I was the kind of animal] + [I think; where from and bound, I wonder, where] from BLP Website
• Three Frankenstein sonnets in Blackbird
• Four Frankenstein sonnets + an interview with Muench/Rader in The Economy
• Three Frankenstein sonnets in the new DMQ Review
• Five Frankenstein sonnets in the new POOL
• Two poems in the wonderful Luna Luna
• [You are the text, my work's broken down, so] from The Hound
• [Here, white elephants seemed odd to us] with Bill Domonkos from Likestarlings
• [This is for the woman with one black wing] + [Now let us go back to the stunning] from Kettle Blue Review
• more sonnets appear or will appear in New American Writing, Fifth Wednesday, Zyzzyva, Columbia Poetry Review, and American Poetry Review

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If a book can be both innovative and traditional, Suture is. The first line of every sonnet is taken from a previously published sonnet by a well-known poet such as Gerard Manley Hopkins, Rita Dove, Eavan Boland, Pablo Neruda, Wallace Stevens, Adrienne Rich and many others. After that first line, Muench & Rader take turns writing a quatrain or tercet each until the poem is complete.  Each poem contains three voices and is a grafting of the old and the new, and in some cases, the living onto the dead--hence the "Frankenstein Sonnets." Published in April of 2017, Suture hit #4 on the Small Press Distribution Poetry Bestseller List.
                                               
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P R A I S E   F O R   S U T U R E
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Suture is a triumph. Here, two powerful and idiosyncratic poetic forces unite to create something utterly unique: a rare and pulsating lyrical conversation. With vibrating sonnets that shape shift and sounds that knock the sleeping bones awake, these poems allow us to understand we are all stitched to one another through language.
                                                                                                                       Ada Limón

This witty, ingenious book of sonnets casts the shadow of affection and the light
of collaboration on a hallowed traditional form. There is a great deal to enjoy and
even more to learn from the way Simone Muench and Dean Rader come
sideways at the sonnet, using improvisation, found lines and sheer invention.
They put old lines into conversation with new ones, and fresh approaches at
 conventional usage. The result is subversion, disruption and delight.
                                                                                                                Eavan Boland

The endurance of the sonnet sequence over the centuries is in no small measure due to a paradox: it is a form that revels both in its fluidity and in its structural exactitude. The sonnet sequence is also apt to engage us because it is typically an expression of solitary yearning, just like the blues. Petrarch longs for his unattainable Laura; Son House laments his dead beloved. In Suture, Simone Muench and Dean Rader turn this latter convention of the sonnet sequence on its head, transforming a mode that seems predicated on an essential loneliness into a collaborative effort, one that is rambunctious, wry, companionable, jittery; and, above all, emotionally capacious. Muench and Rader write with an elegant but mysterious synchronicity—like octet and sextet. 
                                                                                                               David Wojahn

You can spend too much time, while reading collaborations, trying to figure out who wrote what, or worse—you can't help but see it, through the seams and stitchery. But these poems are smooth as can be. Muench and Rader, collaborating not just together but with the first lines of other poets, have created or found (who cares?) a beautifully singular voice that pushes back gently every time you pause to wonder "How was this made?" Very quickly you stop asking and find yourself halfway through this excellent book.
                                                                                                           Matthew Rohrer

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SIMONE AND DEAN DISCUSS THE SUTURE ​PROJECT

On Collaboration: The Frankenstein Sonnets (from Zyzzyva, volume 101, Fall 2014)

Simone Muench & Dean Rader

This particular collaboration began in January 2013. Initially, we contemplated several ideas including a correspondence-type of collaboration in which we would trade individual poems; however, we wanted our voices intertwined in a way that would be indistinguishable to the reader: neither a Rader voice or a Muench voice, but a new third-bodied utterance spawned by differing styles. We elected on assembling the poems stanza by stanza, using this more integrative approach in an effort to co-join the presumed chaos of collaboration with the formal constraints of the sonnet. Because collaboration is frequently perceived as chaotic and can often suffer, as the luminary Michael Anania notes, from the “bipolar diffusion or poetic jiu-jitsu contending egos can produce,” we resolved to work within the framework of a highly structured form—specifically, the sonnet.

We refer to our poems as "Frankenstein Sonnets" because we cut lines from other poet’s sonnets, then graft our own sonnets onto the originating skein of flesh. When we first decided that Frankenstein would be the umbrella concept for our sonnets—the suturing together of other’s flesh/words with our own—we addressed how much should be cannibalized and how much should be our own. We ended up being minimally cannibalistic, deciding only to swap lines from other people’s sonnets to employ as the first line (which also serves as the title). So, for example, Simone would provide Dean with a line and we would then write the first stanza initiated by the provided line, thus establishing the first rhyme set as well as the type of sonnet, before forwarding it to the other person who would complete the second quatrain and then send it back to the other person who would generally write a tercet. Then, that 11-line poem would go back one last time to the other person to be completed. Then we’d move on to a new poem. Dean would send Simone a line 
from a sonnet that would become the first line of the new poem, and we’d recreate the monster all over again.

The idea of using the sonnet to build the being of the poem appealed to us (though we try to avoid overtly famous lines), and in doing so, we are also considering “what exactly comprises a sonnet” and “what contemporizes a sonnet.” 

One of the great things about poetry is its history of creative borrowing. Sampling has rather recently made its way into mainstream coolness, but poets have been sampling each other for centuries. In these collaborative pieces, we’ve stitched that tradition into the body of the poems 
themselves.