Nets by Jen Bervin (Ugly Duckling Presse, paperback)
Publication Date: November 1, 2003
Publisher Marketing: "Jen Bervin has reimagined Shakespeare as our true contemporary. Her little poems sing"—Paul Auster
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.
