I became
One of them, leaning over the railing
And no one would help
The humans left
Not even the humans
Staying Alive
Laura Sims
March 2016
The restraint is active, and the spaces, the silences, are freighted.
C.D. Wright
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?
About the Author
Laura Sims is the author of Looker, a debut novel (Scribner). She has published four books of poetry, most recently Staying Alive (UDP), and is the editor of Fare Forward: Letters from David Markson (powerHouse Books).
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
Publication Details
ISBN: 978-1-937027-62-9
Trade Paperback
80 pp, 5.5 x 7.75 in
Publication Date: March 01 2016
Distribution: Asterism Books (US)