The Wild Hunt Divinations: A Grimoire

We’ve come a long way since William Wordsworth defined poetry as emotion recollected in tranquility—perhaps too far, as can be seen in Ketner’s second collection. Ketner, a National Poetry Series winner for [White], calls their latest collection a grimoire, or spell book, explaining that they used an Ouija board technique to arrive at their content. Derived from William Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets, Ketner’s work consists in titling each of these sonnetlike presentations after the first line of a Shakespearean sonnet and then sending the Bard’s 14 lines to an anagramming site that arranges the letters in each line into new words. Take for example, Sonnet 18: “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day.” Its first line: “Thou art more lovely and more temperate,” becomes “my amateur she-hair, salt-scooped-elm.” Or look at Shakespeare’s Sonnet 104, “To Me Fair Friend You Never Can Be Old.” With Ketner’s anagram method, its first line, “For as you were when first your eye I eyed,” transforms to “foam endured—veil cronebone, fray it.”

CORRECTION: This review originally used the wrong pronouns for Ketner and misstated how many books they’ve published. LJ regrets the error.