Poetry | Soft cover | 79 pages | $14

Poet Moira Egan finally turned fifty, and her poetic journey has gotten ever sweatier and sexier. In her latest collection, Hot Flash Sonnets, she explores the sultry joys and humorous indignities of becoming a woman of a certain age . . .

The Academy of American Poets has awarded Egan the Raiziss/De Palachi Fellowship for her translation of Letters of Black Fire by Italian poet Giorgiomaria Cornelio. 

Praise for Hot Flash Sonnets

[Egan’s] unabashed admissions, balanced by the sonnet’s strictures and the wit of her endings, extend to the reader the double pleasure of craft and disclosure.

Billy Collins, former U.S. Poet Laureate 

Impassioned sonnet virtuouso Moira Egan makes a magnificent obsession of the passing of the menses in Hot Flash Sonnets. Lusty candor is here galore — if the Wyf of Bath were reincarnated as a sonneteer, she would be Moira Egan — but it’s the skill of this poet that dazzles, for she turns her stunning sequence into a vast landscape, contouring matters of beauty and aging in divinely controlled lines.

Molly Peacock

Adept to the edge of mystery, which more than seldom laps at their edges, Moira Egan’s Hot Flash Sonnets raise the stakes of light verse beyond wit to encompass willfulness, wordplay, and womanly wisdom.

Annie Finch

A virtuoso number, witty, pithy, tragi-comic . . . These sonnets remind me, not surprisingly, of John Berryman, but with less self-indulgence.

Marilyn Hacker

Moira Egan portrait

About the Author

Moira Egan’s is the author SPIN (Entasis Press, 2010), Cleave (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 2004), La Seta della Cravatta/The Silk of the Tie (Associazione Edizioni l’Obliquo, 2009), and Bar Napkin Sonnets (The Ledge Press, 2009). She is the editor of HOT SONNETS (Entasis Press, 2011). Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including  The Best American Poetry 2008. With her husband, Damiano Abeni, she published Un mondo che non può essere migliore: Poesie scelte 1956- 2007 (Sossella, 2008), a substantial selection of poems by John Ashbery, which won a Special Prize of the Premio Napoli (2009). She has been a Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; Writer in Residence at the St. James Cavalier Centre for Creativity in Malta; a Writing Fellow at the Civitella Ranieri Center; and, most recently, she has been awarded a Residency at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center. She lives in Rome.