A mother's illness and death is only the beginning of the story of STRANGER. This is a death whose presence and particulars are inscribed. We feel from all angles, as Sims's quicksilver narrative moves through a mother's life and its incompletion, apprehension of death, and the adult child's attempts at comprehension. In the end is a hopeful hopelessness approaching Eternity.
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"There is an abundance of white space in Laura Sims's Stranger, white space that connotes absence. The title itself implies unknowing, missing information, and speakers in the poems are hesitant, unsure of their relationship with anything that surrounds them - yet they are aware of a change, of crossing an invisible boundary. Stranger speaks to loss, specifically the loss of a mother. More so, the poems explore the composition of absence, and attempt to outline the components that evaporate at death and those that remain whole and viable in memory. The ethereal ever-presence of the dead, real or imagined is repeatedly expressed throughout the collection. It is evident in a later poem's title, 'She is water poured out.' Death can be seen as a release: in death, one achieves simultaneity with other unliving things that carry dramatic force, such as sky or water. The speaker recognizes hope that her relationship with her mother need not die or end with her mother's death; death is simply a borderland or blending, even if only imagined as such."--Melinda Wilson, www.coldfrontmag.com
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"In Stranger, Laura Sims enters the territory of the irreconcilable, where the intimacy that lies deepest in us--'Alive with its absence'--remains event or entity that 'Dissent cannot undo.' Yet Sims responds to the necessary and unbearable dilemma of loss with the revivifying intimacies of language. 'There is no such thing as a copy,' the poet rightly insists, and yet her lucidity plumbs, recalcitrant and fierce, into experience that we all know, or will. There is no more adept or trustworthy guide into this terrain." (Elizabeth Robinson )
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5.0 out of 5 stars
The poetic story reaches beyond earthly life into the theme of an afterlife,
By Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Stranger (Paperback)
Prize-winning poet and writing teacher Laura Sims presents Stranger, her second collection of free-verse poems. The poetry weaves a complex narrative about a mother who falls ill and dies too young; her surviving child must work through guilt. What is a mother, truly, after she has passed on? The poetic story reaches beyond earthly life into the theme of an afterlife, in this unforgettably poignant collection. "Wherever we went the mountains followed": You shuffled behind / In your long pearl dress, ridiculous / Lily / Pinned to your chest / Come on / The mountains are gaining / Have eyes / For those flimsy white curtains.
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