108 sonnets

That moment just before the monsoon strikes, when you realize the world won’t ever be the same... The sonnets in this mesmerizing, meditative sequence, loosely focused on an expatriate’s life in Bangkok over the course of a year, show that this time-honored form can convey fresh impressions in a bracing, contemporary way.



Vivid, immediate, and compact, the sonnet, in spite of its origin in the distant 13th- and 14th-century world of Dante and Petrarch, still commands an unmatched power to capture a single moment or feeling.



These sonnets, which can move within the space of a line or two from wry detachment to devastating sincerity - not to mention the occasional ineffable epiphany - survey topics as diverse as teacups, samurai, mummies, and monitor lizards, all ordered in larger thematic groupings that, while not exactly forming a narrative, roughly trace some of the author’s ongoing fumblings toward understanding.



Two brief formatting notes: 1) each sonnet should have 14 lines - for comfortable reading, you may need to resize the text so that most lines fit across your screen without breaking; and 2) these poems were all written on a smartphone without the use of capital letters, so they don’t have any.