Nets

“The title of Jen Bervin’s Nets enacts the very project of her book. It’s an abbreviated form of the word Sonnets, just leaving ‘nets’ — as if she’s taken a net, and filtered Shakespeare’s words through it. She visually lightens certain phrases in a poem, leaving behind new, more prominent threads of words. When you strain your eyes, you can still faintly find a palimpsest of the greyed-out words from the original. But the newly bolded words remain clear, either underlining something that was already latent, or taking it in a new direction. In her words, she’s ‘stripped Shakespeare’s sonnets bare to the ‘nets’ to make the space of the poems open, porous, possible — a divergent elsewhere.’” Read more...

The best books on Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Scott Newstok, Literary Scholar