If there were such a thing as poetry police, Phyllis Koestenbaum believes she might be nabbed.
The Sunnyvale writer’s seventh and latest volume, a collection of 66 poems titled “Criminal Sonnets,” addresses crimes and criminals. What’s more, the poems “are criminal in terms of the form,” she says.
In addition to taking liberties with the 14-line sonnet’s traditional rhyme schemes, Koestenbaum turns the sonnet’s standard tone on its head.
“The big guys wrote love sonnets; these are not love poems by any means,” explains the poet, a Radcliffe graduate whose work has been widely anthologized. “I’m talking in many ways about the absence of love in the world and in my life” at the time the pieces were written.
The void stems mostly from the heartbreaking disintegration of her 30-year marriage.
According to Koestenbaum — a writing teacher and a senior scholar at Stanford University’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender — her husband left her and their four children 15 years ago with little more than a note. The poems hint of an extramarital affair.
“It all fell apart very, very suddenly, although there should have been warnings for someone less naive than I,” she says.
Pain and anger led Koestenbaum to pen a searing existential diary. Blending her internal suffering with suffering in the world around her, she turns to images of lawlessness, paranoia and atrocities in Iran, Guatemala and Nazi-occupied Europe.
Auschwitz-Birkenau, Klaus Barbie and crematoria float grimly alongside such mundane pictures as picking up clothes from the laundry, a Sealy Posturepedic mattress and an afternoon at the movies.