NEW RELEASE
James Maynard, THE FOURTEEN THIEVES & BODY CAMS
MONDAY EDITIONS is excited and proud to publish James Maynard’s latest chapbook, The Fourteen Thieves & Body Cams.
The collection has two parts: the crown of sonnets titled “The Fourteen Thieves,” and the fourteen additional sonnets that make up the collection’s second part, “Body Cams.”
Anyone who has followed Maynard’s long-running Substack publication, And Now, A Sonnet, or read his earlier chapbooks (Throwaways and An Absence of, An Earnest), knows that the hallmarks of a Maynard poem are its idiosyncratic diction and syntax, not to mention its eccentric system of punctuation. As for Maynard’s poetic voice, it could pass for the mutterings of a pirate marooned in the Chaucer Collection at the British Library, if that pirate’s mental soundscape included a continuous loop of James Joyce’s Ulysses.
James Maynard’s Escher-like sonnets expand one’s sense of how sonnets work and how collections are formed. The present collection, begun “in memory,” has been transmogrified by time, tradition, colonialism, and instinct. Maynard’s arresting, unflinching poems offer “new meanings, spoken and sung.”
—Kortney Garrison, author of Elemental and Every Broken Year: The Persephone Cycle
But these twenty-eight sonnets, for all their grounding in the Anglo-American tradition—Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Wordsworth, Coleridge, et al.; and, on the American side, Phillis Wheatley, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Claude McKay, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks—are also heir to the later innovations of Wanda Coleman, while standing in conversation with the more recent experiments of Terrance Hayes, Patricia Smith, Jericho Brown, and Diane Seuss.
In this collection, James Maynard takes his place among the remarkable poets who are reinvigorating and reshaping the American sonnet. These poems sing of torments—personal, historical, linguistic, poetic—and invite a reckoning with our worthwhile but ordinary lives.
—Jesse DeLong, author of The Amateur Scientist’s Notebook: Poems
Maynard acknowledges that the collection’s poems are anything but accessible.
“I feel I must explain a landscape that is clear in my mind but foreign to others,” he writes in “For an Age of Torment,” his introduction to the book.
And so he does explain—minimally. Otherwise, he leaves the poems to speak for themselves. That gesture recalls the invitation Laurie Anderson issues at the beginning of her spoken-word piece “Difficult Listening Hour” (United States Live, 1984, track 13): “Sit bolt upright in that straight-backed chair, button that top button, and get set for some difficult music.”
—Waning Gibbous IV
Executive Editor
Monday Editions
James Maynard, The Fourteen Thieves & Body Cams (Monday Editions, 2025). Limited edition of 50 copies, signed and numbered; 46 pages, with an introductory essay by the author. ISBN: 979-8-9926804-1-6. Publication date: June 16, 2025. Price: $10. Order here before the limited edition sells out.
James Maynard will read from The Fourteen Thieves & Body Cams on Monday, June 16, at Word Virus Books, 6518 SE Foster Road, Portland, 7–8 PM.