Michael Simms

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."