Sonnet's Shakespeare

Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award-winning poet Sonnet L'Abbé returns with her third collection, in which a mixed-race woman decomposes her inheritance of Shakespeare by breaking open the sonnet and inventing an entirely new poetic form.

DOROTHY LIVESAY POETRY PRIZE FINALIST

RAYMOND SOUSTER AWARD FINALIST

How can poetry grapple with how 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 Sonnet's Shakespeare, 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 pysche and in the poetic canon.

In a defiant act of literary patricide and a feat of painstaking poetic labour, Sonnet L'Abbé… Keep Reading