Interviews

Interview and Poems at THE FLORIDA REVIEW ONLINE

Interview “Complicated, Difficult Beings” at MAYDAY

“High Wire Acts” (at the Boston Review with BK Fischer

At the Conversant via Radio Albion by Tony Trigilio (audio)

In Barn Owl Review by Krysia Orlowski

In Devil’s Lake by Rebecca Hazelton

At 12 or 20 Questions by Rob McLennan

At Please Excuse This Poem

Reviews of Assia

The novel takes us deep into the Plath-Hughes-Wevill psychodrama, which stands in for a cultural dynamic of violent misogyny that is still horribly alive. Our obsessions are our unsolved cultural crimes. In the Ted Hughes chapter that opens the novel, the poet goes home to visit Sylvia, not yet dead, and their children. “It’s a big mistake, to return to the crime scene,” he writes, “but that’s what all criminals do, right?” Later, he protests: “I am not a criminal. Love is not a crime!” Simonds’s novel asks what happens when we return to the scene of the crime, only to find that we have never left. There is no way out, and no way to clean up the mess. Kristen Grogan, Los Angeles Review of Books

Reviews of Triptychs

The magic of her work lies in how Simonds conveys a particular image of capitalism rendered obsolete by the Schumpeterian wave of creative destruction, overtaken by “One-Click” purchases, selfcheckouts, and e-receipts…Triptychs rails against ossification of feeling and heralds an elegy if we fail to care for people and things. Tiffany Troy, rain taxi review of books

By orchestrating layout and language within the confines of a triadic structure that appears to transcend a naive conception of the dialectic, Simonds’ book effuses the personal, historical, and philosophic conjunctions one expects from their fondest memories of dreams—the sort that touch uncertain emotions and provoke our sense of meaning with new alertness. Nicholas Michael Ravnikar, The Georgia Review

Why do we need this poetry now? Simonds’s Triptychs captures the malaise and the anxiety and infinitely delayed gratification of the Covid years. It validates the fragmented nature of these years and the columns fracture the pandemic and open up possibilities between, alongside, and among our experiences, which have otherwise been circumscribed by travel bans, stasis, and lost opportunities. Benjamin Landry, Verse Curious