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“There is an abundance of white space in Laura Sims’s Stranger, white space that connotes absence. The title itself implies unknowing, missing information, and speakers in the poems are hesitant, unsure of their relationship with anything that surrounds them – yet they are aware of a change, of crossing an invisible boundary. Stranger speaks to loss, specifically the loss of a mother. More so, the poems explore the composition of absence, and attempt to outline the components that evaporate at death and those that remain whole and viable in memory.
The ethereal ever-presence of the dead, real or imagined is repeatedly expressed throughout the collection. It is evident in a later poem’s title, ‘She is water poured out.’ Death can be seen as a release: in death, one achieves simultaneity with other unliving things that carry dramatic force, such as sky or water. The speaker recognizes hope that her relationship with her mother need not die or end with her mother’s death; death is simply a borderland or blending, even if only imagined as such.”—Melinda Wilson, www.coldfrontmag.com
A mother’s illness and early death is only the beginning of the story of Stranger, Laura Sims’ second collection. This is a death whose presence and particulars are felt and inscribed, and which achieves an agency, a purview, a resistance. We feel the loss from all angles, even as Sims’ episodic, quicksilver narrative moves up and through mother’s life and its incompletion, her apprehension in the face of death, a surviving child’s guilt and the adult child’s attempts at comprehension of who/what the mother is, now that she’s gone. In the end there is a hopeful hopelessness in approaching Eternity. Laura Sims’ delicacy and agility are equal are equal to her forbearance, and all are up to the remarkable task of recounting a life and afterlife.
Endorsements:
“In Stranger, Laura Sims enters the territory of the irreconcilable, where the intimacy that lies deepest in us—‘Alive with its absence’—remains event or entity that ‘Dissent cannot undo.’ Yet Sims responds to the necessary and unbearable dilemma of loss with the revivifying intimacies of language. ‘There is no such thing as a copy,’ the poet rightly insists, and yet her lucidity plumbs, recalcitrant and fierce, into experience that we all know, or will. There is no more adept or trustworthy guide into this terrain.”—Elizabeth Robinson
“‘Only that which does not cease to hurt remains in memory,” says Nietzsche. That's not to say that we can't remember comfort or love, but it might be to say that such things have to be stung into our minds by comfort's failures, love's exits. “No one's gonna save your life,” sings Wire’s Colin Newman; too true, but maybe someone will remember you. And yet even as memory preserves us, its inevitable elements of blank ensure that death retains an ever-painful (occasionally laughable) strangeness. In and with those elements, Laura Sims has written these memorable elegiac shards.”—Graham Foust
Graham Foust
Graham Foust
From the Book:
A Mouth full of bread
And leaning
Against an anonymous car
Baguette in one hand, acres
Of country surround
[My mother]
Had never
Been so undone
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LAURA SIMS is the author of Practice, Restraint, recipient of the 2005 Fence Books Alberta Prize. Her book reviews and essays have appeared in Boston Review, New England Review, Rain Taxi, and The Review of Contemporary Fiction, and she has recently published poems in the journals Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, CAB/NET, and Crayon. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches writing at Baruch College in Manhattan.
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