Practice, Restraint

by Laura Sims

Laura Sims's debut is the work of an organic synthesizer, one practiced in the restrained art of listening. Her poems exhibit an attenuation that is akin to devotion: By means of maxim and miniaturization, she sorts and stacks the products of humanness. Memes and phonemes of a haiku-like fineness are thereby invited to break the surface of the page.

Genres: Poetry

99 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2005

About the author

Laura Sims’s third novel, THE MAN, is due out from Putnam in July of 2026. Her novels HOW CAN I HELP YOU (2023) and LOOKER (2019) have been on Best Books lists in The New York Times, Vogue, People Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, Real Simple, Publishers Weekly, and more. An award-winning poet, Sims has published four poetry collections; her essays and poems have appeared in The New Republic, Boston Review, Lit Hub, and Electric Lit. She lives in New Jersey, where she works part-time as a children’s librarian.

Reviews

[Simone]

with language sims is a magician

[Holly]

So much


space


(empty, white)


what does it mean


to arrange ten or eleven


or twenty or twenty-five


lithe, little shapes


on a page


and pretend they


are words?



Plus the line at the end of "Little House" that is quoted as wisdom in one of the blurbs on the back of the book--"it can never be long, long ago"--is borrowed from the final sentence of Little House in the Big Woods: "It can never be a long time ago." I realize Sims signals this, but still. It seems a bit cheap to get one of your big ideas from a book plenty of people read in second grade.