Sonnet 56 (Los Angeles: Les Figues Press)

Here's the Small Press Distribution description of my new book, Sonnet 56, parts of which I've placed on this blog over the last year. What a beautiful book Les Figues Press created; I'm delighted with it. The image above includes the front and back cover. Many thanks to Ian Monk for his introduction to the work. The official book party will be at Moe's Books of Berkeley on October 20, 7 p.m. (with Norman Fischer). The book contains only a handful of sonnets, such as "Noun Plus Seven" and "Homosyntactic Translation." The rest are in other forms, including the villanelle, tanka, haiku, blues, qasida, and crossword puzzle.
The Small Press Distribution order page is: http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/9781934254127/sonnet-56.aspx?rf=1/
The Les Figues order page is http://lesfigues.com/lfp/199/sonnet-56/

Poetry. Paul Hoover's SONNET 56 mixes Love, Poetry and Shakespeare in a marvelous grab bag of form, wit and playfulness. Starting with Shakespeare's sonnet 56--"Sweet love, renew thy force, be it not said / Thy edge should blunter be than appetite"--Hoover writes 56 poetic variations, turning Shakespeare's sonnet into a series of new (and traditional) forms, including: "Villanelle," "Noun Plus Seven," "Limerick," "Blues," "Course Description," "Flarf," "Imagist," "Tanka," "Answering Machine," "Rilke," "Morse Code" and "Bad Writing." The result is tender portrayal of love and an excellent survey of the possibilities within contemporary poetry. SONNET 56 is published as part of the TrenchArt: Maneuvers Series, with an Introduction by Ian Monk and visual art by VD Collective.

Author Hometown: MILL VALLEY, CA USA

About the author: Paul Hoover is the author of eleven books of poetry. He is the editor of the anthology Postmodern American Poetry (W. W. Norton, 1994) and, with Maxine Chernoff, the annual literary magazine NEW AMERICAN WRITING. His collection of literary essays, Fables of Representation, was published in the Poets on Poetry series of University of Michigan Press in 2004. He teaches at San Francisco State University.