Michael Simms

Read Pittsburgh Post Gazette Review

 

A paean is a song or hymn of praise, joyous in its tribute to another person or idea. It also well-sums the voice and tone of Pittsburgh poet Michael Simms’ latest collection, “Jubal Rising,” where the speaker embraces and sings to those small moments that bring him pause — the washing of turnip greens, observing a skateboarder maneuvering through the landscape of Downtown, his dog Josie facing “each day with the thrill of play.”

Asheville Poetry Review

 

In Simms’s “Pupa (a meditation on becoming)” from Strange Meadowlark, the life of a butterfly from caterpillar to a being with “translucent wings / ... in a flittering arc” also evokes a child—here, the speaker’s daughter—as well as his aging but still changing self.

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Let the wonders of location and dislocation transport you in these new books by George Looney and Michael Simms.

Your Impossible Voice Review

 

Michael Simms’s great American novel offers lessons and not just escapism. It substantiates the dream that all people are created equal, whatever the color or creed, that hope is not only eternal but also that the Second Coming can offset any Apocalypse—if we are willing to pay a price that is worthy of our freedom and an integrally righteous way of living our lives.

Pittsburgh Quarterly Review

 

If a send-up provides Bicycles…the needed spectacle, it’s the characters of all stripes that add sprawl and perspective as Iraq war vets struggle to adapt, and the Virgin Mary is a single-mom backed by The Sisters of the Piston, a gang of leather-wearing nuns on Harley’s. There’s even a scene where a pack of wild dogs attack members of the Proud Boys. Perhaps, Simms is correct when he says, “After all, who wouldn’t love a story about badass vigilante nuns and the end of the world, right?” Praise be.

Read Live Encounters Review

 

Bicycles Of The Gods is an apocalyptic saga that is always riveting, always thought provoking, and alternately funny and sad. It is refreshing to read a novel that, while satiric, takes seriously spiritual journey.   One of the truly surprising parts of the novel is that, while religion is satirized, it is never disrespected.   It’s a real accomplishment.

Read Compulsive Reader Review

 

Anne Lamott said, “good writing is about telling the truth.” Michael Simm’s poetry is about just such truth telling. It sings but sings with the kind of honesty one finds in Hayden Carruth, that deep digging to get to the heart of a matter, highly personal moments yielding universal insight. Strange Meadowlark is Michael Simm’s fourth full-length collection, and it radiates like concentric rings from existential concerns to teleological ones, from personal to public. 

Read Cultural Daily Review

 

Perhaps it is only in moments of transcendence—whether through art, nature, or love—that we truly live and appreciate the value of living. In Strange Meadowlark, Michael Simms wrestles with the paradoxes of existence, and reaffirms that the struggle is worthwhile.

Read Cultural Daily Review

 

The Green Mage does deliver the things that discerning readers look for in fantasy stories. There are cool invented rituals, such as a wedding ceremony unlike any this writer has seen. Equally cool is the scientific explanation of how a dragon breathes fire. (Mini-spoiler: it’s like lighting a fart. The dragon summons a methane-laden belch and ignites it by clicking her teeth.) There are also scenes that mimic actual modern history, except with key details changed. A young man who slipped into petty crime is surrounded by a circle of his neighbors, who subject him to a public treatment that looks eerily like the denunciation sessions practiced in China during the Cultural Revolution. But instead of shaming the fellow, people shower him with praise and love. Features like these are prized in fantasy because they invite us to envision how life could be, as opposed to the same old same old. They’re nicely rendered throughout The Green Mage.

Read WESA Review

 

Simms still expresses hope for humanity, and so does “Bicycles of the Gods.” While he doesn’t consider himself conventionally religious, he does think we’d do well to follow some core teachings of Jesus, as they are laid out in his novel.

Read Pittsburgh Post Gazette Review

 

Simms has created a wild, syncretic ride refashioning old stories in a contemporary light. Will Jesse succeed? Will the world end? Spoilers: As the poet George Herbert wrote, “”But Love and Grace took Glory by the hand / and built a braver palace than before.”

Read Cultural Daily Review

 

Bicycles of the Gods achieves a roaring finale—no more spoilers will be given here—in which the borders of Earth and the afterlife come down, brave and inevitable sacrifices are made, and much that has been hidden is revealed. Readers, buckle yourselves in for a wild ride.

Read Coal Hill Review

 

"Nightjar gives you that sense of showing up at the back door, unannounced, unheralded, and exhibiting all the signs of having gone through a rough journey—a journey that might not be quite over yet. It’s a journey that got there not by consulting a hundred maps and reading every Yelp review or by leaving the GPS on and having some robotic voice tell you when to turn left, when to go straight ahead, and when to stop. It’s a journey that found its way by being true to its own unique vision."

Read Cultural Daily Review

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“Simms focuses attention on the material of the world and then surprises the reader with the power of what that focus, honed by a gift for words and experience, can do. Every poem gave me something to recognize, something to grapple with, some magic that made me see the world in a new way."

Read Coal Hill Review

 

"This is a wonderfully human book. Flawed and triumphant.”

Read Kris Collins's Review

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“The poems gently insist we can be greater than our worst impulses… and therein lies the magic of the book. By confronting the darkness, Simms enacts a restoration of the light.”

Read Weave Magazine Review

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"Any anthology trying to cover all of contemporary American poetry will, by definition, fail. The American poetry landscape is vast and multitudinous. This is, perhaps, why so many anthologies choose to focus on a specific type of poet or subject. But The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry succeeds as well as any anthology can, limited as it is by its 384 pages and the aesthetic preferences of its three editors. “Poetry,” Michael Simms writes in his introduction, “captures the essence of what it is to be alive at a particular time and place.” If this is the goal of the poem, it is also the goal of the poetry anthology, which Autumn House Press has reached."