"The restraint is active, and the spaces, the silences, are freighted." — C.D. Wright
Excerpt ˇ
Excerpt
I becameOne of them, leaning over the railing
And no one would help
The humans left
Not even the humans
Close ˆ
About the Author
Laura Sims is the author of My god is this a man, Stranger, and Practice, Restraint (all from Fence Books), and five chapbooks of poetry. She edited Fare Forward: Letters from David Markson (powerHouse Books), a book of her correspondence with the celebrated experimental novelist. Sims has been a featured writer for the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog, and has been a co-editor of Instance Press since 2009. She teaches literature and creative writing at NYU-SPS and lives with her family in Brooklyn. Staying Alive (UDP, 2016) is her fourth book of poetry.
Links
Interview with Joe Massey for the Studio One Reading Series blog, about apocalypse and the poems of Staying Aliveon Poetry & Murder in “Poetry Off the Shelf”
Book Details
Trade Paperback. 80 pp, 5.5 x 7.75 in.ISBN 978-1-937027-62-9
Publication Date: March 1, 2016
Distribution: SPD
- 08.16.16 | Laura Sims' Staying Alive reviewed by Trista Edwards at The Los Angeles Review
- 07.05.16 | Laura Sims' Staying Alive reviewed at The Found Poetry Review
- 07.06.16 | Laura Sims' Staying Alive reviewed in Publisher's Weekly
- 06.23.16 | Laura Sims' Staying Alive reviewed by Michaela Mullin at Nomadic Press
- 06.01.16 | Laura Sims' Staying Alive reviewed by Sara Burant at OmniVerse
- 05.24.16 | Laura Sims' Staying Alive reviewed at Heavy Feather Review
- 05.21.16 | Laura Sims' Staying Alive reviewed at Broken Pencil Magazine
- 05.18.16 | Laura Sims' Staying Alive reviewed on Strange Horizons
- 05.12.16 | Laura Sims' Staying Alive reviewed on Fjords
- 05.04.16 | Laura Sims interviewed on Touch the Donkey
- 03.15.16 | Laura Sims in conversation with Kenneth Calhoun on Literary Hub
- 03.10.16 | Laura Sims' Staying Alive reviewed by Greg Bem in Queen Mob's Teahouse
- 03.02.16 | Laura Sims' Staying Alive reviewed by James Wagner in The Mirage
News and Reviews
Advance Praise
Laura Sims is a startlingly original poet whose work goes very deep, like a well made of animal and human bones mortared together with rubber tires, dismembered books, dismembered dolls, and a lot of other unlikely stuff that draws water from thousands of feet under the surface of the earth.—Peter Straub, on MY GOD IS THIS A MAN (F
Brilliantly spare, Laura Sims’s poems take huge leaps–always oblique, and always uncannily precise… These poems don’t speak about things as much as they speak the things themselves: the complex situations of human society become distilled into vivid instants–sometimes alarming, often gorgeous, and always rendered in a language refreshed by her frank intelligence.—Cole Swensen, on PRACTICE, RESTRAINT (Fe
Upon the terrible isolation of words, the poet builds a progression of critical songs for a critical time. The restraint is active, and the spaces, the silences, are freighted.—C. D. Wright, on PRACTICE, RESTRAINT (Fe
Sims reaches a steady hand down into the unknown and comes back with poems that gleam.—Heather Sweeney, Dusie