Underground Facility

In Underground Facility, as in C. E. J. Simons’s first Isobar collection, imagined afterlives of Shakespearean characters bridge past and present: Oberon and Puck turn investment bankers, Gonzalo is deaf to the plight of Mediterranean refugees, while Sycorax might be an embodiment of the laws of thermodynamics. However, the earlier book’s refusal to anthropomorphize nature now gives way to symbolic representations of human life and history through animal portraits – a glass frog as a devoted father, hermit crabs as sex addicts, a grasshopper as an interplanetary missionary. Moreover, in place of celebrating poetic self-effacement, Underground Facility grapples with autobiography: poems about grandfathers, fathers, mothers and sisters engage with how we build ourselves out of inherited fragments, rituals, superstitions, and conflicts.