Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award-winning poet Sonnet L'Abbé returns with her third collection, in which a mixed-race woman decomposes her inheritance of Shakespeare by breaking open the sonnet and inventing an entirely new poetic form. DOROTHY LIVESAY POETRY PRIZE FINALIST RAYMOND SOUSTER AWARD FINALIST How can poetry grapple with how some cultures assume the place of others? How can English-speaking writers use the English language to challenge the legacy of colonial literary values? In Sonnet's Shakespeare, one young, half-dougla (mixed South Asian and Black) poet tries to use "the master's tools" on the Bard's "house," attempting to dismantle his monumental place in her pysche and in the poetic canon. In a defiant act of literary patricide and a feat of painstaking poetic labour, Sonnet L'Abbé works with the pages of Shakespeare's sonnets as a space she will inhabit, as a place of power she will occupy. Letter by letter, she sits her own language down into the white spaces of Shakespeare's poems, until she overwhelms the original text and effectively erases Shakespeare's voice by subsuming his words into hers. In each of the 154 dense new poems of Sonnet's Shakespeare sits one "aggrocultured" Shakespearean sonnet--displaced, spoken over, but never entirely silenced. L'Abbé invented the process of Sonnet's Shakespeare to find a way to sing from a body that knows both oppression and privilege. She uses the procedural techniques of Oulipian constraint and erasure poetries to harness the raw energies of her hyperconfessional, trauma-forged lyric voice. This is an artist's magnum opus and mixed-race girlboy's diary; the voice of a settler on stolen Indigenous territories, a sexual assault survivor, a lover of Sylvia Plath and Public Enemy. Touching on such themes as gender identity, pop music, nationhood, video games, and the search for interracial love, this book is a poetic achievement of undeniable scope and significance.

Inspired by Shakespeare, an award-winning poet creates “smart, surprising and affecting [poetry] . . . Poems that are easy to read and difficult to forget” (David Scott Kastan, Yale University). In his engaging new collection, National Book Award finalist Gary Soto creates poems that each begin with a line from Shakespeare and then continue in Soto’s fresh and accessible verse. Drawing on moments from the sonnets, Hamlet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and others, Soto illuminates aspects of the source material while taking his poems in directions of their own, strategically employing the color of “thee” and “thine,” kings, thieves, and lovers. The results are inspired, by turns meditative, playful, and moving, and consistently fascinating for the conversation they create between the bard’s time and language and our own here and now. “I read Gary Soto’s poems with delight. There’s no one I know, certainly in this language, who writes like him.” —Gerald Stern, National Book Award–winning poet “Soto insists on the possibility of a redemptive power, and he celebrates the heroic, quixotic capacity for survival in human beings and the natural world.” —Publishers Weekly “Gary Soto is a consummate storyteller . . . Intelligent, funny, and bitingly honest. He is also a craftsman, a master of metaphor and simile, his language capable of dazzling somersaults.” —Martin Espada, National Book Award–winning poet “Shakespeare’s words are never more alive than when they are being seized upon, twisted, remade and made anew. Gary Soto, a brilliant recycler, has laden his ship with old gold. Himself a brilliant recycler, Shakespeare might well have been pleased.” —The Norton Shakespeare

One of the most frequently read and performed of all stage works, Shakespeare’s Hamlet is unsurpassed in its complexity and richness. Now the first fully annotated version of Hamlet makes the play completely accessible to readers in the twenty-first century. It has been carefully assembled with students, teachers, and the general reader in mind. Eminent linguist and translator Burton Raffel offers generous help with vocabulary and usage of Elizabethan English, pronunciation, prosody, and alternative readings of phrases and lines. His on-page annotations provide readers with all the tools they need to comprehend the play and begin to explore its many possible interpretations. This version of Hamlet is unparalleled for its thoroughness and adherence to sound linguistic principles. In his Introduction, Raffel offers important background on the origins and previous versions of the Hamlet story, along with an analysis of the characters Hamlet and Ophelia. And in a concluding essay, Harold Bloom meditates on the originality of Shakespeare’s achievement. The book also includes a careful selection of items for “Further Reading.”

This book argues the idea that Shakespeare was deeply engaged with other poets and with pursuing a career as a poet, and that the organisational schemes of the Sonnets have been hiding in plain sight for over four centuries. The fundamental reason why his schemes have gone unnoticed is historical: within decades of his death, conventions of sonnet sequences became unfamiliar, and they have largely remained so since. Weaving together ideas of the Sonnets as a free-standing sequence and as a sonnet sequence among other poets' complex sequences, we discover new insights into Shakespeare's career as a poet.