Books by Thomas Simmons

This is the first full-length study of the radical poetry of Baton Rouge-based poet Dylan Krieger. Wickedly smart, iconoclastic, daring in their critiques of religion and contemporary culture, Krieger's poems rank with Allen Ginsberg's and Adrienne Rich's as the most provocative and avant-garde of any recent generation.

Praise for BRING YOUR NIGHTS WITH YOU: New & Selected Poems, 1975-2015IT IS as if all of human experience, knowledge, and geography are encoded and distilled within this new double volume of poetry by Thomas Simmons, such is the tremendous conceptual, intellectual, and sonorous range of the work. The poet incorporates so much worldly perception and literature within these pages that it is as if the reader is being offered a vision of both human and unearthly existence at once.The drama of voice and also of diction magnify and amplify this literary magnificence, the mature work of a humanist whose learning and poetic ability extends beyond any specific personal moment, engaging with a thoroughly extensive mortal terrain. However, there exists an unseen sub-textual performative quality inside all of these poems which raises the words and lines off the page-within the mind of the reader-and which supply the language with an enigmatic non-verbal quality: simultaneous, immediate, and so profoundly finite. This uncanny pneuma is intrinsic to the worth of these two fine books.It is as if the poet is foretelling his own life, but in paradoxical retrospect, such is the vivacious and vital nature of consciousness at work in these lines. It is a distinction of writing and awareness, of both sadness and fascination, as thepoet's attention careers away from a world before grace towards an imperishable and indelible comprehension.The poet says, Among those I loved you were the first ... whose only choice was to prevent my ever reaching you; and then later, How to say good-bye when one has already gone? Such sentiments are the mysterious and contrary threads that run through the fabric of this wonderful poetry binding the emotions and material detail into one strong medium, a tissue of song whose mastery lies not only in the expression but in its even greater indication of what cannot be said. Such is the genius of knowing the unspeakable and yet being competent and compassionate enough to endure that terrific and necessary effort which art can only imply.--Kevin McGrath, Harvard University There's a deep, rumbling power to these poems, a kind of wild but tempered energy that comes only when you're lucky enough to encounter a poet capable ofweaving accessible narrative with vivid, well-crafted lyricism. There's humor, too,not to mention savage intelligence paired with refreshing humanity and political conscience. In short, Simmons has gifted us with a collection spilling over with my favorite breed of poems: the kind you can teach in a classroom, lounge with on a beach, or cling to in the waiting room of an E.R., confident that at the veryleast, you're in good company.--Michael Meyerhofer, author of What To Do If You're Buried Alive

Thomas Simmons' collected poems are a burning-a wild search of blue flame, the kind with the least oxygen but the most heat, a kind that levels a landscape built on a range of religion, myth, philosophy, erotic intimacy-and aims to rebuild it with the act of looking at it with clear eyes.From the shut-in child who says, "I began to calculate the area … of my life" and "how much I had, in inches, millimeters, feet," to the reveling in the grown body's hidden ecstasies and "the rightness of the body in its rightful place," Simmons' poetry contains a watchfulness that is complicated by its own act of watching. It is a watchfulness aware of its failings, which vacillates from an undistracted mission-such as Muhammed who, with the "tunnel vision" of religious fervor, only sees "out of the corner of his eye, the child Ayesha uncupping her hands and lifting the butterflies aloft"-to the full acknowledgement that any understanding comes beyond language, like the father and the child who take a wordless walk in the snow and discover "it had been enough, the sound / Of boots in the snow, the quiet, the sudden sun, Her hand in his."Simmons examines how human experience is best understood with tools outside of language, outside the relentless pursuit of assigning sign to signifier. There he says, we can find among the wreckage, "the beauty of it: my own circular ruins." For it is the not "hard words that we train for" but its subsequent weighty silences, the aftermath, and after reading it, one is left haunted and unsettled by images-such as the child shaking in his loft bed during a hurricane busily loosening the rafters of his house-images that silence our chatter-filled mind as we recognize it, unfailingly, as ourselves. --Leslie Contreras Schwartz, author of Fuego and Nightbloom & Cenote

What if the primary relationship in a poet's oeuvre is actually between the first and last text, with those two texts sharing a compelling private language? This book examines both the evidence of some new phenomenon and a limit or unsolved problem that finds its resolution only in a specific conversation with the final text.

In many ways, Robert J C Young writes, colonization from the very first carried with it the seeds of its own destruction. This title examines some ways in which Young's observation could be applied to problems of subjectivity and influence within the colonizing nations themselves, particularly eighteenth-century Britain.