Jen Bervin has reimagined Shakespeare as our true contemporary. Her little poems sing.

Nets has the strange feel of verbal topography: the original sonnet text is a sort of plain that single, select words soar up from like jagged spires.

Bervin shows us ways in which we might open up pre- or over-determined uses of past structures without erasing them—making the poems all the more complex by their refusal to dislocate. Her Nets is context responsive and responsible, without the knot of lyric-envy and linguistic guilt of many contemporary poems that pillage the past for strangeness, or worse, for an energetic imagination that might impersonate the writer's.