Steal It Back

Author: Sandra Simonds

Publisher: Saturnalia Books (2015)

What if all women try to Steal It Back? America, art, life. They're in Sephora, on Twitter, at McDonald's. They're single mothers and teachers, Catholic schoolgirls and martyrs. And they're all stealing it back. Sylvia Plath gets a Malibu beach house. Lady Gaga hatches from an egg of triumph. They're hovering between the tax collectors and the Romantics, between Florida's lakes and every lavish thing in 17th century France. Steal It Back journeys through America's factories, its Bed, Bath, and Beyonds, and its homes, where desires rise and fall, where they decide what they will fight for and what they will concede. Steal It Back, Sandra Simonds' fourth poetry collection, is a primal scream that we can't help but pay attention to.

"In Steal It Back the "it" is both humanity and wildness; "it" is Time; "it" is pleasure; "it" is power. Language is loot and Sandra Simonds is our Robin Hood "full of exaggerations and energy." "I want very badly to talk to you," she writes gearing up to sing, summon and unsettle. These unforgettable new poems sway (meaning both swing and persuade) with the kind of intellectual heft and verbal play only Sandra Simonds can make." 

–Terrance Hayes