Staying Alive
March 2016
Staying Alive
$14.00
"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?
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
Links
Interview with Joe Massey for the Studio One Reading Series blog, about apocalypse and the poems of Staying Alive
Excerpt
I became
One of them, leaning over the railing
And no one would help
The humans left
Not even the humans