Practice, Restraint [Paperback]

Laura Sims (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 2005

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Laura Sims' poetry collection Practice, Restraint is exactly what the title says it is--a practice in restraint. The restraint is not a holding back but rather a restraint in the strictest sense of poetic discipline and craft. This stunning debut collection is challenging and full of gratification for readers not afraid to trust intense lyrical poetry, brave leaps, and sparse language."--Amanda McGuire, Mid-American Review Volume XXVI, No. 2, Spring 2006

"Brilliantly spare, Laura Sims's poems take huge leaps--always oblique, and always uncannily precise. Arranged in separate books that illuminate their subtle themes, these poems don't speak about things as much as they speak the things themselves: the complex situations of human society become distilled into vivid instants--sometimes alarming, often gorgeous, and always rendered in a language refreshed by her frank intelligence. This book is a jewel, compressed and sparkling."--Cole Swensen

Review

"Laura Sims's work engages the lyric critically on its own ground. This is especially true in the fascinating 'Bank' series, where the poet subtly tags the lyric's chronic preoccupations with the tracking devices of financial institutions, so that we get, 'the blue of withdrawal,' or 'A peacock/ . . . /refuting/what rifles report from her far-flung states.' In these poems we move immediately beyond innocence. Sims gives us a sly, fast-paced, strangely resonant form of minimalism." (Rae Armantrout )

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Product Details

• Paperback: 99 pages
• Publisher: Fence Books; First Edition edition (November 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0974090999
• ISBN-13: 978-0974090993
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,031,238 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An anthology of sparsely worded free-verse poems, April 10, 2006

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Practice, Restraint (Paperback)

Practice, Restraint is an anthology of sparsely worded free-verse poems, steeped in the author's quintessential talent to imply volumes from brief phrases. Touching upon complex situations through the minute illumination of instants, Practice, Restraint resembles a haiku collection in spirit, though it does not employ the haiku format specifically. "Moses": Fourteen lanes / with sky on one end // and the end / of the human disgrace / on the other- // a fetish, the urban form // a lake / is self-regard but a highway / slithers // the car // grows skin after skin on its errand from God // If you finish your supper, / from one end of this mess to the other, / rewards

5.0 out of 5 stars Practice Makes Perfect, April 12, 2006

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Practice, Restraint (Paperback)

I saw Laura Sims read over the weekend and I was drawn to buying her book, PRACTICE, RESTRAINT, winner of the Fence award. Physically the book is quite handsome, sort of: it has a fantastic photo by Laurie Simmons on the cover (sort of the same name as the poet, just jumbled a little, and with a longer history of making art) from 25 years ago, a studio built construction of a tiny boy navigating great channels of blue water, like the climax of SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS in which Natalie Wood tries to drown herself. And the book comes bound in one of those covers with the book flaps that turn back in on themselves, I forget what they're called, but they always seem so classy. On the down side, the paper itself looks like the kind used for coloring books in Communist countries.

Sims reads very slowly, as though drawn into the sound of her own voice, sometimes responding as though hypnotized, and the poetry reads that way too. The writing itself is lean, spare, plucked of fat. The manuscript opens with "lost Book" and one almost feels that this describes the present book, it's been somehow lost, so that the poems continue, torn and tattered as Barbara Frietchie's gray flag, but we are left to piece together the significance of what once happened from the remnants that stutter across each page. "Have I seen such a tower" it begins, provocatively, and a few lines down we hear of a "tower of ash where the hearth wound down." You can't help but think of the poem, trailing down the page, as visually resembling such a tower, a tower of ash with much of its life burnt out by exigency and winter chill.

Sims isn't exactly begging for sympathy however. There's a fair amount of humor in her book as well. On the back of the book Cole Swensen refers to the leaps of Sims' rhetoric as "always oblique, and always uncannily precise." That's true to a certain degree but sometimes the leaps aren't oblique, but click like billiard balls (indeed I think of Rube Goldberg as well as Laurie Simmons when I imagine their construction)-and yet finally, at the end of the poem, I wonder how precise the poems wind up being. They don't have the "Gotcha" effect of Lorine Niedecker or Elizabeth Bishop. I think they play in a fuzzier land, like she's high all the time. "The great city waits for an echoing crack." I know that's true where I live!