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“Laura Sims' poetry collection Practice, Restraint is exactly what the title says it is—a practice in restraint. The restraint is not a holding back but rather a restraint in the strictest sense of poetic discipline and craft. This stunning debut collection is challenging and full of gratification for readers not afraid to trust intense lyrical poetry, brave leaps, and sparse language.”—Amanda McGuire, Mid-American Review Volume XXVI, No. 2, Spring 2006
Laura Sims’ exquisite debut is the work of an organic synthesizer, one practiced in the restrained art of listening, Her poems exhibit an attenuation that is akin to devotion: by means of maxim and miniaturization, she sorts and stacks the products of humanness. Memes and phonemes of a haiku-like fineness are thereby invited- or allowed- to break the surface of the page.
Reviews:
“Brilliantly spare, Laura Sims's poems take huge leaps—always oblique, and always uncannily precise. Arranged in separate books that illuminate their subtle themes, 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. This book is a jewel, compressed and sparkling.”—Cole Swensen
Endorsements:
“Laura Sims's work engages the lyric critically on its own ground. This is especially true in the fascinating ‘Bank’ series, where the poet subtly tags the lyric's chronic preoccupations with the tracking devices of financial institutions, so that we get, ‘the blue of withdrawal,’ or ‘A peacock/ . . . /refuting/what rifles report from her far-flung states.’ In these poems we move immediately beyond innocence. Sims gives us a sly, fast-paced, strangely resonant form of minimalism.”—Rae Armantrout
“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. Laura Sims's tooled precision proposes a choice between friendship and drowning or between harmony and delusion. The poems shine on the cracks in the perfected appointments of armchair authorities. Time, in its bounty of tired truths and consequences, reminds us, "It can never be long, long ago." Practice, Restraint is a keen and coolly discerning debut collection.”—C. D. Wright
Click here for TABLE OF CONTENTS
From the Book:
Musical, Chemical, Figurine
In cut-offs, wearing a necklace of coral—
the dead from the mountain.
Suddenness raises this dust in the air.
"I moved a mountain and men came out"
"and also made rounds of the hotel lobby"
"looked up to see beds in the sky"
"in formation, both women and men, disheveled"
"but calmly descending"
"a smell in the air"
"of chlorine—the kidney-shaped pool"
filled with ice cubes. Filled with perfection
Honored
with wire
and stars,
the dead,
held aloft,
on a velvety couch in the lobby: a damp spot,
whose suddenness
opens the way
Awards/Recognition:
Alberta Prize 2005
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LAURA SIMS lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where she teaches English and Creative Writing. Her poems have appeared in the journals 6 X 6, 3rd Bed, Boston Review, and 26, among others. Her chapbook, Bank Book, was published by Answer Tag Press in 2004.
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