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Staying Alive by Laura Sims

 

 

Fjords Review,Staying Alive by Laura Sims

May 5, 2016

Poetry
Staying Alive
by Laura Sims

Ugly Duckling Presse, 2016
180 pages
ISBN 978-1-937027-62-9

 

by Sean Speers
X

About Sean Speers

Sean Speers is pursuing an MFA in poetry at The New School. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Penn Review and The Dreams Journal and his articles have been published by the USA TODAY network. He lives and works in New York.

 

In her fourth collection of poetry, Staying Alive, Laura Sims revisits familiar grounds the way one would revisit a cemetery. The poems are eerie, reverent and unrelenting in their grief. At the core of the collection is apocalypse and the driving force is decay. It’s a story as old as time told without narrative, told only though gaunt images skeletal in appearance yet plump with substance, “Tidbits of bone or//A fat red sirloin//Forked on a stick”. Sims has created a pastiche of the most memorable tales of the world’s end, then “Gutted, slashed//And gutted” until all that remains are those images which are most brilliantly haunting and hauntingly brilliant. She borrows from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, H. G. Wells’ The War of the Wolds and the TV show Voices from Chernobyl, among others.

The pages themselves chart an absence: words placed sparingly, carefully on the page, making a compelling case for barrenness. Immediately we find “The source of our decadence—all of deep space—extracted” yet what remains is decadent in its obvious necessity. The poems sound like sirens from thin air and impress with urgency. I challenge you to find an extraneous mark. The poems read like road signs might if they were written by William Carlos Williams leading through a scene in a Tarantino film on the way to Hell.

The city teems. Above

It isn’t heaven; it’s

The ruin

 

Where

You shine

The style of the book is not unlike Sims’ previous collections: aptly spare and with an eye for spatial arrangement. The collection is split into three sections, though I found it difficult on a first reading to justify the divisions. The afterword goes a long way to clarify, but I still wasn’t entirely convinced the section breaks weren’t just an excuse to add a few more (admittedly killer) epigraphs. The voice is undoubtedly the same we find in her first three collections, and remains unwavering: candid, intelligent and “grim set on living” while everything around crumbles. If her second book of poems, Stranger, is a collection of words between a poet and her mother’s ghost, we might think of Staying Alive as a collection of “Words////Between a person and her soul,” her manic, death-anxious soul.

I get the sense reading Sims’s poetry that she is most comfortable writing about tragedy, but that may well be because she makes it so comfortable to go along with her. It’s not that she extracts the horror but that she sharpens it into sublimity. She focuses so intensely that you can see life wiggling in the most desolate corners of the earth. She doesn’t lament empty space but shows you that it’s not as empty as you thought; “the atom is everywhere”. She even takes time in the afterword to explain that bleak, dusty Mars shows signs that it may once have fostered life. It is exactly as she says, “squint and the city revives,” and this is what the collection itches to do. Zoom in far enough on the sedentary and you’ll find activity, far enough on death and you’ll find life.

“We’ll stand between death and its shining ideals//We’ll fatten from hunger and light the whole earth”.

Archives

Hush by Nikki Ummel

Alexis Rhone Fancher’s Erotic: New and Selected Poems

Chasing Homer by László Krasznahorkai

Eight Perfect Murders by Peter Swanson

The Death of Sitting Bear by N. Scott Momaday

WHILE YOU WERE GONE BY SYBIL BAKER

MY STUNT DOUBLE BY TRAVIS DENTON

Made by Mary by Laura Catherine Brown

THE RAVENMASTER: My Life with the Ravens at the Tower of London

Children of the New World By Alexander Weinstein

Canons by Consensus by Joseph Csicsila

And Then by Donald Breckenridge

Dear Everyone by Matt Shears

Magic City Gospel by Ashley M. Jones

Intimacy by Stanley Crawford

Lunch Poems by Deborah Kuan

The Best American Poetry 2016

One with the Tiger by Steven Church

Crosstalk by Connie Willis

The King of White Collar Boxing by David Lawrence

They Were Coming for Him by Berta Vias-Mahou

Verse for the Averse: a Review of Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry

That Other Me by Maha Gargash

Simone by Eduardo Lalo

Swimming by Karl Luntt

Ghost/ Landscape by Kristina Marie Darling and John Gallaher

Enchantment Lake by Margi Preus

Bad Light by Carlos Castán

Diaboliques by Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly

Core of the Sun by Johanna Sinisalo

Fireflies by John Leland

Maze of Blood by Marly Youmans

Tender the Maker by Christina Hutchkins

Little Anodynes by Jon Pineda

Conjuror by Holly Sullivan McClure

Someone's Trying To Find You by Marc Augé

The Four Corners of Palermo by Giuseppe Di Piazza

Now You Have Many Legs to Stand On by Ashley-Elizabeth Best

The Darling by Lorraine M. López

How To Be Drawn by Terrance Hayes

Watershed Days: Adventures (A Little Thorny and Familiar) in the Home Range by Thorpe Moeckel

[INSERT] BOY by Danez Smith

Demigods on Speedway by Aurelie Sheehan

Find Me by Laura Van Den Berg

Singing Bones by Kate Schmitt

Knuckleball by Tom Pitts

Wandering Time by Luis Alberto Urrea

Teaching a Man to Unstick His Tail by Ralph Hamilton

Domenica Martinello: The Abject in the Interzones

Control Bird Alt Delete by Alexandria Peary

Twelve Clocks by Julie Sophia Paegle

Love You To a Pulp by C.S. DeWildt

Even Though I Don’t Miss You by Chelsea Martin

Women by Chloe Caldwell

Fifteen Dogs by Andre Alexis

ESSAY 2:12 A.M. by Kat Meads

Revising The Storm by Geffrey Davis

Quality Snacks by Andy Mozina

Midnight in Siberia by David Greene

Strings Attached by Diane Decillis

Down from the Mountaintop: From Belief to Belonging by Joshua Dolezal

The New Testament by Jericho Brown

You Don't Know Me by James Nolan

Phoning Home: Essays by Jacob M. Appel

Words We Might One Day Say by Holly Karapetkova

Murder by Danielle Collobert

Sorrow by Catherine Gammon

The Americans by David Roderick

Put Your Hands In by Chris Hosea

I Think I Am in Friends-Love With You by Yumi Sakugawa

Third Wife by Jiri Klobouk

box of blue horses by Lisa Graley

Review of Hilary Plum’s They Dragged Them Through the Streets

The Sleep of Reason by Morri Creech

The Hush before the Animals Attack by Carol Matos

Regina Derieva, In Memoriam by Frederick Smock

Review of The House Began to Pitch by Kelly Whiddon

Hill William by Scott McClanahan

Seamus Heaney Aloft

The Bounteous World by Frederick Smock

Review of The Tide King by Jen Michalski

Going Down by Chris Campanioni

Review of Empire in the Shade of a Grass Blade by Rob Cook

American Neolithic by Terence Hawkins

Review of The Day Judge Spencer Learned the Power of Metaphor

Review of The Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a Fish

Review of Life Cycle Poems by Dena Rash Guzman

Review of Saint X by Kirk Nesset

Review of Jessica Treadway's Please Come Back to Me

Eve Asks by Christine Redman-Waldeyer