Supplice

Published by the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University

Winner of the 2014 Colorado Prize for Poetry, Supplice is the second installment in T. Zachary Cotler’s sonnet sequence that began with Sonnets to the Humans.These are amatory sonnets, but with love and rhyme tortured into broken and boneset textures. Supplice herself, the dark lady of these poems, is difficult to pin down with an epithet. Is she the angel of reality, banality, popular culture, pornography, uncertainty, or economic and environmental crisis? She has something to do with the history of cruelty and pain, with the devaluation of traditional ideas of beauty, and with the silence and science that have replaced divinity.