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Crafted initially in strips handwritten on rolls of receipt paper obtained at a dollar store, then assembled into three textual columns that sit side-by-side on the page, these triptychs are joined or disjoined in several ways—through diction, through the special relation of words (evoking intimacy, touch or, in contrast, alienation), and through thematic similarities or dissimilarities. Each poem is wildly surprising, ranging from conversations between Baudelaire and Jayne Eyre to the enjoyment of macaroons. As a result, the poems energize the confines of this writing space as they invite readers to recall painterly constructions and news headlines, wherein each pillar is in conversation with another, sequentially and simultaneously. With the same lyric attention found in all of Simonds’s poetry, the poems here mark an innovative shift in poetics that is both polyvocal and singular.
"Simonds paints a careful portrait of the struggle to embrace difficult realities in an age in which it would be irresponsible to ignore them, even if doing so offers no easy path forward. "—starred review for ATOPIA, Publishers Weekly
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I Gave Birth in Another Era
Bildungsroman
Reading The Bell Jar in Everglades National Park
Gong! Gong! Gong!
Now that You’re Dead, I’m Observing Great Bodies of Water
With Joy with No Joy
Now Wait for Last Year
Let’s Make the Water Turn Black
And the Days Shall be Filled with Music
The Poet Enters Through the Subjunctive Mood
Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk
I Sang a Song with the Dead
March Pandémie
Planting a Loquat Tree During the Worst Week of the Pandemic
As in the Pyroclastic Volcano
The Future is Not What it Was
Your Eyes Resemble Mine
Poem with Three Lines by Gustaf Sobin
Dollar Tree Poiesis
Tick Tock Cryptic
Hold! Said the Hand Said the Money
To Take a Lover in the Intricately Woven Kaleidoscope
Dear Anselm,
Pastoral in the Minor Key
The Only Cloud in the Sky to Impress me with a Demoniacal Grandeur
The Password is Hex Key 526
The Flammagenitus Strophes
Skate World Waveform
It was Raining in the French Concession
Double Happiness or “Modernity Means Contingency”
Trashland Political Economy
An Equanimous Defense of the Exclamation Point
New Year’s Requiem
Makeup Pollen Ointment
I Bought You a Bonsai Cypress Tree on the Way to the Shore
On Avondale and Riverside