No Small Comfort

In No Small Comfort we find America’s interiors and exteriors, the homes and landscapes messy, chaotic in a way that any of us might recognize. And yet these scenes are imbued with a kind of peaceful acceptance, as well, even as the ground drops out from beneath our feet in these lines and “fog / becomes an essay / on gravity and fate / whose claims won’t hold up.” Some poems we go to for comfort, others to be shaken awake. In Simoneau’s new book of quiet lyrics, we find the kind that mark the minutes we hold our breath waiting for the other shoe to drop. “Semblance, similitude, synchronicity: / everything comes together until what / happens is nothing special, nothing new.” That’s certainly not true here, where Simoneau does what every good poet knows in their bones—he’s made us see it new.

—Keetje Kuipers