NETS

Author: Jen Bervin 

Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse (2003)

In NETS, poet and artist Jen Bervin strips Shakespeare's sonnets "bare to the nets," chiseling away at the familiar lines to reveal surprising new poems, while pointing obliquely at the unavoidably intertextual ground of writing. Using visual compositional strategies as effectively as verbal ones, Bervin allows the discarded text to remain on the page as a ghostly presence, while she highlights the marginal line-numbers that allude to the sonnets' canonization.

"Jen Bervin has reimagined Shakespeare as our true contemporary. Her little poems sing."

–Paul Auster