Deep Gossip

Throughout her seven critically acclaimed collections, Sidney Wade has established herself as a poet with a serious but light touch, one capable of the clarity and inventiveness it takes to work a problem both to pleasure and to resolution. Playing with and challenging form in all directions, the 27 new and 96 selected poems in Deep Gossip bristle with a sly wit that trips and delights the reader.   

 

Wade disguises some sonnets by arranging their perfect rhymes so they're not immediately audible. She composes other sonnets in dimeter, rather than pentameter; works in syllabics; includes one poem written in the octave stanza form invented by John Berryman for his book-length "Homage to Mistress Bradstreet"; and entrances readers with her long and skinny couplets, a form she perfected in her last collection, Bird Book. Inspired by landscape, language, music, and living things, as well as the occasional bout of political outrage, Deep Gossip is a smart collection, deceptively so.