My God Is This A Man

Description

Poetry. Laura Sims's third poetry collection engages the escarpment of the page itself: walled-off phrases set against spare lines on largely empty pages, a proto-graphical representation of thought itself. These poems replicate the psychic fragmentation that's necessary for evil-doing: relationship as crime scene, the folk ballad re-writ for our new cult of mass-shootings, "the quiet and unmeaning" of a natural world wrought horrific...

"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

"I don't know the exact method or intent behind the poems of Laura Sims's MY GOD IS THIS A MAN, but I know how they feel: harrowing, probing, troubling, surprising, and often gorgeous. It's as if Stein and Dickinson had been invited to converse about the effects of serial murder on body, soul, and mind: a strange wonder. The phenomenological and moral turbulence of these poems is matched by their sonic and structural grace, making Sims's book a profound offering to ongoing, important conversations about the nexus of aesthetics, violence, representation, and empathy."—Maggie Nelson

"In this minimalist account of the language of killers, Laura Sims creates disturbingly powerful chords of empathy. Reading, we discover ourselves inside the one who begs, "For heaven's / sake catch me /before I kill more." Like a photographic negative the book shows only the barest lines of its subjects, but in so doing reveals more, and more hauntingly, than full exposure ever can. We don't want to turn the page, and we do. Looking away is not an option, because we are seduced."—Julie Carr

Author Bio