Staying Alive

Staying Alive

March 2016
Read Excerpt

Staying Alive

Original price was: $14.00.Current price is: $12.60.

SKU: 978-1-937027-62-9 Category:
"The restraint is active, and the spaces, the silences, are freighted."
— C.D. Wright

About the Book

In her fourth poetry collection, Staying Alive, Laura Sims envisions the state of the world and of human existence before, during and after the forever-imminent apocalypse. In channeling and sampling works of apocalyptic fiction and non-fiction—The War of the Worlds, The World Without Us, How to Stay Alive in the Woods, and The Road, to name a few—the poems explore multiple world-endings and their possible outcomes, and pose answers to the questions: will we, how do we, and should we stay alive?

Press Release

Author

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
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
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
Sims reaches a steady hand down into the unknown and comes back with poems that gleam.
— Heather Sweeney, Dusie

In the News

Laura Sims’ Staying Alive reviewed in Scout Poetry
Laura Sims’ Staying Alive reviewed on The Literary Review
Laura Sims interviewed by Claudia F. Savage in BOMB Magazine
Laura Sim’s Staying Alive reviewed in Gazing Grain Gazette
Laura Sims’ Staying Alive recommended at The Paris Review
Laura Sims’ Staying Alive reviewed by Trista Edwards at The Los Angeles Review
Laura Sims’ Staying Alive reviewed at The Found Poetry Review
Laura Sims’ Staying Alive reviewed in Publisher’s Weekly
Laura Sims’ Staying Alive reviewed by Michaela Mullin at Nomadic Press
Laura Sims’ Staying Alive reviewed by Sara Burant at OmniVerse
Laura Sims’ Staying Alive reviewed at Heavy Feather Review
Laura Sims’ Staying Alive reviewed at Broken Pencil Magazine
Laura Sims’ Staying Alive reviewed on Strange Horizons
Laura Sims’ Staying Alive reviewed on Fjords
Laura Sims interviewed on Touch the Donkey
Laura Sims in conversation with Kenneth Calhoun on Literary Hub
Laura Sims’ Staying Alive reviewed by Greg Bem in Queen Mob’s Teahouse
Laura Sims’ Staying Alive reviewed by James Wagner in The Mirage

Links

Interview with Joe Massey for the Studio One Reading Series blog, about apocalypse and the poems of Staying Alive

on Poetry & Murder in “Poetry Off the Shelf” 

Excerpt

I became

One of them, leaning over the railing

And no one would help

The humans left

Not even the humans

Details

ISBN: 978-1-937027-62-9
, 80pp, W:5.5in x H:7.75in
Publication Date: March 1, 2016
Distribution: