This month we are celebrating the titles that we’ve acquired in the past six months. These manuscripts came to us through our open reading periods. Today we bring you Brian Simoneau, author of the poetry collection No Small Comfort, which will be published in 2021.
Have a manuscript you think we’d like? During our November Open Reading Period we are looking for poetry (chapbooks and full-length collections), short fiction (again, both chapbooks and full-length collections), novels, novellas, nonfiction (CNF, biography, cultural studies) and translations from German. Also, our Big Moose Prize for the novel is currently open to early bird submissions.
The Author
Brian Simoneau is the author of the poetry collection River Bound (C&R Press, 2014), which was chosen by Arthur Smith for the 2013 De Novo Prize. His poems have appeared in Boston Review, Cave Wall, Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, The Georgia Review, Mid-American Review, Poet Lore, RHINO, Salamander, Third Coast, and other journals. Originally from Lowell, Massachusetts, he lives near Boston with his family.
On Writing No Small Comfort
I started working on the poems in No Small Comfort back in 2006 or so, mostly at the kitchen table in our cozy apartment, the top-floor of a triple decker in the Roslindale neighborhood of Boston. I’d recently moved back to Massachusetts after six years in Oregon and California, and in that time I’d finished an MFA, buried my father, and married the woman I love. Now, struggling to feel connected to a place that had once been home to a very different version of myself, I threw myself into another round of graduate school and immersed myself in reading poetry and prose from Donne to Dickinson, Emerson to Baldwin, Old English riddles to critical theory. I responded to these voices and others as I drafted poems about places I missed and places I barely recognized, and I realized I was writing—as I had been for years—about the ways grief recedes and returns over time, how it changes and changes but never really goes away.
Over the next ten years, I left my PhD program to teach high school, and then I left teaching to stay at home with our three daughters. I still wrote a lot about loss and landscape, but as I experienced the worries and joys of fatherhood, I became more and more preoccupied with the moments we miss as they happen. Instead of always dwelling on the past and all that’s lost, I wanted to look closely at the present and to imagine a future not yet marked by grief. As I slowly gathered these poems, I ultimately found myself grappling with loss and nostalgia, with fatherhood and anxiety, with what it means to make a home in a constantly changing world. I’ve tried to make seen the moments that too easily escape our notice, common experiences that make each of us part of something bigger, some larger process of living and dying that often remains beyond understanding.
Excerpts
A Lake Opens Up Beneath Your Feet Like the sound you imagine a bone makes as it breaks if you never broke a bone, atonal snap that’s nothing like rifle crack or thunder clap or knot in a crackling log. Like a twig crunching underfoot only if you’re standing only on twigs over a deep hole you didn’t know was waiting but are now certain is studded with sharpened stakes, your breath gripped. There’s no simile for such sound—no metaphor for thuds, thumps, crashes, passing seconds contracting the space around the brain—only the sound of the sound, every echo unsayable. Of course if you’re not alone, or if you’re alone and getting it down in lines is what crosses your mind, then you’re not really hearing it right because it happens so fast, so fucking fast, but perhaps it’s beside the point since even those who’ve never heard the silence of snow will know ice breaking when sound begins to break beneath them. *** Record Flooding as Metaphor for Grief Not the river rushing its banks and breaking dams, overrunning sandbags stacked in the hours before it crested. Not the unmeasured depth that wrecks a pickup and the tow truck grinding to haul it out, the mud-brown wall that splinters trunks like twigs and rips up others, roots and all. Not the risen water, not the raging waves, but the basement slowly gaining back its shape: seven feet of muck pumped out, a foundation unhoused, four stone walls with only space to hold, the contents of boxes spilled and spoiled—photos and baby clothes soaking in sludge—all of it exposed, opened up to sky, the sudden sky and its cruel light pouring through what used to be shelter, and nothing left to fill such a hole. *** No Small Comfort Branches bare on Friday managed to bud by Monday morning— my weekend hike beside a creek to find a centuries-old grindstone not nearly as impressive as winter-dormant blossoms making their sudden yellow show against blue sky, my newest lines about seasons spinning into place with storm after storm no match for photosynthesis setting itself in motion again. Every tree spreads its leaves and converts the atmosphere to food using water and sunlight, feeding itself and releasing what I need to breathe. Me? In a couple of weeks I can grow a beard that catches crumbs from the crust of my steak and cheese. It’s impossible, turning the corner to millions of these little flags unfurling, not to be impressed by a world that makes itself over each day. It baffles, befuddles to think of living, breathing creatures seeming all but dead all winter one day flourishing colors and textures and odors I hardly recognize after months of shielding my eyes from the glare of snow and ice, turning away from bare branches and the longing empty space between them makes. In a mind made numb by winter it’s easy to accept doing the same thing over and over and hoping for different results as a version of insanity. Really it’s no small comfort to know what grows before our eyes keeps going: trees coming into bloom or two-day whiskers on my chin, or the skin on my hands scored by scars. Under all there’s little difference. In a world that cuts us— every last one of us—down, it’s no small comfort to see what we see and be overcome.