Everything Appeared That Night, by Leslie Simon

Poetry, chapbook, 32 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Ancestors hover here, but so do dreams, a joke or two, and references to how we tell our stories. Starting with the one about a flat tire and how it ties itself to time, the stories these poems spin move from public protest to private repair. The way poets play with words, wrestling them beyond the sounds they make to the meanings they attempt, becomes subject and refrain.

These poems also caress and corral. They pull you in before you even know you are turning over in your head the idea of love and longing—from getting left behind to getting laid to the larger loves and struggles that keep us persisting on, yes, this “holy planet.”

Leslie Simon grew up on the South Side of Chicago. She moved to San Francisco because she heard poets lived there. Simon founded the Poetry for the People publishing and performing collective at City College of San Francisco in 1975. Her publishing credits include Collisions and Transformations (Coffee House Press), High Desire (Wingbow Press), i rise/ you riz/ we born (Artaud’s Elbow) The Divine Comic (Spuyten Duyvil) and A Music I No Longer Heard: The Early Death of a Parent with Jan Johnson Drantell (Simon and Schuster). Poetry, prose poetry, fiction, and oral history.