Sophie Mayer

I spent far more time reviewing (most recently on Sabotage Reviews) than being reviewed, so please forgive my over-excitement at these extremely kind and exciting words from John Field, in a review of Tom Chivers' bobby-dazzler of an anthology, Adventures in Form. On Poor Rude Lines,  Field writes:

In 'Volta for the Sonnet as a Drag Queen,' Sophie Mayer foregrounds the artificiality of the form in the first of [her] two sonnets: ‘The sonnet’s a drag, and girl, it knows: sticks its / falsies, lines up its lashes. Lamé, lurex, tits / aglitter’. In The Private Parts of Girls, Mayer broke new boundaries between form and genre with her sci-fi poetry and here her language updates Shakespeare’s knowing, playful, gender-bending pyrotechnics which were, in turn, a rebooting of a form which was a bit tired and clichéd, even when he got his mitts on it. As Shakespeare had innuendo working at full stretch, not least with his name, ‘Will’, so does Mayer. ‘Again, again. Limbs aglow/akimbo / if enjambed: the stance, the torch, the blow // that’s always coming. The twist, you know it.’ After this childishness, the sonnet reaches the volta, and with the paradoxical coyness of a tranny, Mayer leaves her twist hidden in a gusset. In the second sonnet all hell’s unleashed, as line breaks break words and the form is ‘mutated to meet the needs of / a poisoned world’.

Not sure I really stand comparison with Shakespeare, but this has my head in a pyrotechnic spin anyway...

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And I have three new poems in Angel Ito's gorgeous magazine, Cock No. 7.