Sonnet's Shakespeare

Sonnet L'Abbé, the Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award-winning poet, returns with her third collection, Sonnet's Shakespeare, in which a mixed-race woman decomposes her inheritance of Shakespeare by breaking open the sonnet and inventing an entirely new poetic form. This collection has been recognized as a DOROTHY LIVESAY POETRY PRIZE FINALIST and a RAYMOND SOUSTER AWARD FINALIST.

The central question that Sonnet's Shakespeare grapples with is: How can poetry engage with the ways in which some cultures assume the place of others? How can English-speaking writers use the English language to challenge the legacy of colonial literary values? In this collection, one young, half-dougla (mixed South Asian and Black) poet tries to use "the master's tools" on the Bard's "house," attempting to dismantle his monumental place in her psyche and in the poetic canon.

In a defiant act of literary patricide and a feat of painstaking poetic labour, Sonnet L'Abbé works with the pages of Shakespeare's sonnets as a space she will inhabit, as a place of power she will occupy. Letter by letter, she inserts her own language into the white spaces of Shakespeare's poems, until she overwhelms the original text and effectively erases Shakespeare's voice by subsuming his words into hers. In each of the 154 dense new poems of Sonnet's Shakespeare sits one "aggrocultured" Shakespearean sonnet--displaced, spoken over, but never entirely silenced.

L'Abbé invented the process of Sonnet's Shakespeare to find a way to sing from a body that knows both oppression and privilege. She uses the procedural techniques of Oulipian constraint and erasure poetries to harness the raw energies of her hyperconfessional, trauma-forged lyric voice. This is an artist's magnum opus and mixed-race girlboy's diary; the voice of a settler on stolen Indigenous territories, a sexual assault survivor, a lover of Sylvia Plath and Public Enemy.

Touching on such themes as gender identity, pop music, nationhood, video games, and the search for interracial love, Sonnet's Shakespeare is a poetic achievement of undeniable scope and significance. By subverting and rewriting the works of the Bard, L'Abbé challenges the literary establishment and asserts her own unique poetic voice, one that is deeply rooted in her mixed-race identity and personal experiences.

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