Burning Oracle

A fierce, visionary book-length poem

Burning Oracle is a visionary, book-length poem told from the fractures of a world on fire where myth, memory, and contemporary life collide. Cassandra--seer, mother, survivor--wanders through forests of digital noise and historical trauma, her voice both ancient and urgently new. At the heart of the poem is a pilgrimage to the grave of poet Paul Celan where she traces personal loss within the wider context of inherited trauma--particularly the Holocaust--and seeks meaning in the act of remembering. As floods rise and fires rage, the personal and historical ignite a mythic voice. Through the commonplace of stained dresses, shattered screens, and supermarket aisles, Cassandra encounters figures like Goya, Reynard the fox, and Celan himself, weaving their stories into an intertextual, image-rich landscape. Burning Oracle is a feminist reckoning, a personal mythography, and a testament to the power of poetry to animate the archive of history, memory, and everyday life.

[sample poem]

*
From II

No source, my Seine,
a German one instead,
Sixteen & reading Hölderlin's
Der Rhein at the foot of a massive
statue of Goethe and Schiller.
Stupid anorexic American girl.
But not really American.
And not really French.
And not really Turkish.
And not really Syrian.
And not really Spanish.
And the tourists at the camp.
Was I a tourist?
Squeal of the cassette
tape rewinding
Pink Floyd's The Wall.
Ah, when you speak German,
no one can tell
you're American. When you speak
English no one can tell
you're French. Too sick to go on.
Anne of Green Gables Figurines.
I'm always too sick
to go on, that's
my charm--a gray
ruin turned maroon
turned black.

*

It is easier to go mad,
Francisco says,
than one might think.

Easy to lose things.
People too.
Perhaps too easy.
Step inside
and you may not
come back.

He listed the colors he liked:
Black.
Black.
Black.
Black.
He told himself
to stay inside the painting
of the chartreuse river,
stay inside, Reader,
and he found his arms
roping and looping
into Cassandra
holding a tray
of dead pigeons.

SANDRA SIMONDS is professor of English [SS2] and Humanities at Thomas University and the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently, Triptychs (Wave Books, November 2022). Her poetry, criticism, and creative nonfiction have been published in the New Yorker, The New York Times, Best American Poetry, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Chicago Review, Granta, Boston Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere.