Simone Muench is poetry editor of Another Chicago Magazine. She has poems published or forthcoming in Notre Dame Review, Poetry, Indiana Review, The Paris Review, The Bellingham Review, and POOL. Her book, The Air Lost in Breathing, received the Marianne Moore Prize for Poetry from Helicon Nine in 2000. New Michigan Press released her chapbook, Notebook. Knife. Mentholatum., in 2003. Currently, she is Assistant Professor at Lewis University as well as a doctoral student at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Recently, she was one of the Fine Lines winners co-sponsored by Olay and the Poetry Society of America; her winning poem will appear as part of the Poetry in Motion series.

Other poems by Simone Muench in Verse Daily:
August 16, 2005:   "Drowning by the Light of Oranges "I pinned a star..."
July 23, 2003:  "The Melos of Medusa" "I once was a beautiful woman..."

About Lampblack & Ash:

"[T]hese hermetic yet direct poems. . . speak to the reader like high-speed oracles. . . . The depth of identification with mastery, with enormous grief and enormous optimism and joy, becomes her force field."
—Carol Muske-Dukes

"Simone's poems have a confidence and sophistication of what I like to call intentionality. Also wit, grace, poise, and a relationship to writing beyond self-referential feeling. The language is refreshing, musical, attenuated. The literary, cultural references wake us up. This seems a writer inspired by Other. . . . There is an evocative marriage taking place here. Her poems display a highly engaged imagination."
—Anne Waldman

"Lush, sprouting sensuous images line-by-line, adopting myth freely, Simone Muench's poems are volatile explosives, circling beauty."
—James Tate