Austin Clarke praised Sonnet L'Abbé's debut collection in 2001, saying "it is unusual for such exceptional talent to be presented in a first collection of poetry," and since then, L'Abbé has quietly been amassing an international readership.In the decade since her last collection, the acclaimed poet has placed herself at the forefront of poetic innovation, and she returns with her third collection, a work that breaks open the sonnet and invents an entirely new poetic form. How, in this current political moment, do we grapple with how some cultures "take the place" of others? In Sonnet's Shakespeare, Sonnet L'Abbé decides to explore her own colonizing impulses, turning them on the Bard, intent on "taking his place" in the poetic canon.In a defiant act of literary patricide and a feat of painstaking poetic labour, the poet works with the pages of Shakespeare's sonnets as territory she will inhabit. Letter by letter, she settles her own language into the white spaces of Shakespeare's poems, until she overwhelms the original text and effectively erases Shakespeare's voice by assimilating his words into hers. In each of the 154 dense new poems of Sonnet's Shakespeare sits one "colonized" Shakespearean sonnet--displaced, spoken over, but never entirely silenced. L'Abbé invented the process to find a way to sing from a body that knows both oppression and privilege. Think Christian Bök's Eunoia meets Claudia Rankine's Citizen--L'Abbé has used the procedural techniques of Oulipian constraint and erasure poetries to harness the raw energies of her hyperconfessional, trauma-forged lyric voice.This is a writer's magnum opus and mixed-race girl's diary; the voice of a settler on aboriginal territory and a sexual assault survivor, the mash-up stylings of a Sylvia Plath and Public Enemy fan. Touching on such themes as gender trouble and video games, Indigenous resurgence, the role of poetry, and the search for interracial love, this book is one that "Shakespeare will forever sub-utter," a poetic achievement of massive scope and historical significance.
