Sestina Troubadours: Writing in the Labyrinth Anthology

2020 NM/AZ Book Award finalist

Sestina Troubadours is a collection of poems from eleven poets from the Jules' Poetry Playhouse sestina poetry six-week online class, conducted entirely via Zoom in summer 2020. These poems are poignant, revealing and sometimes collaborative and all follow the form of the sestina, with a few tritinas. The circular structure of the sestina form provided us with a scaffolding to hang emotions, language, fears and desires. We have used the Poetry Playhouse labyrinth as a marker to weave our way through writing sestinas, collecting teleutons and playing with different techniques.

Note from editor Jules Nyquist: I encouraged my sestina troubadours to experiment, dig deep into dreams and obsessive topics and to have fun. It is this spirit of collaboration that inspires us to create during lockdown, to move forward, step by sometimes painful step, and write poems that follow the sestina pattern for a sense of satisfaction that we are in this together. We are all together experiencing the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, but also as poets, as writers, we truly need writing in proximity to each other through the ether. The language of poetry can indeed be a very thin disguise, or type of skin, as Ezra Pound says, over the skeleton of form. I hope you will discover the sestina’s grace and magic as it leads us through troubled times and beyond.

Sestina troubadours in this anthology: Hollie Baker, Debora Chappell, Sheryl Guterl, C. John Graham, John Hicks, Shuli Lamden, Erin Lynn Marsh, Lynda Myers, Barbara Robidoux, Janet Ruth and Annie Q. Syed.

Poetry Playhouse Publications

Edited by Jules Nyquist

6 x 9 paperback

61 pages