No Small Comfort
Black Lawrence Press, 2021
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
“They say it’s / love that calls us to the things / of this world,” writes Brian Simoneau, and in this book you’ll find a poet called to the things of this world—its rivers, lakes, trees, and storms—like few others. No Small Comfort is a dazzling meditation on what it means to be alive now on Earth, or even to be alive with the Earth as the natural world lives quite vibrantly in these pages—freezing and thawing, crackling and blooming. Each poem becomes its own landscape of grief, tension, and beauty, charged with a powerful and overflowing reverence.
—Matthew Olzmann