Reviews

  • Rain Check Poems keenly evokes the loss which our entry into the symbolic order thrusts us, that sense of yearning when the sensual and the relational slip into the lacunae of language. Throughout these subtle yet seductive poems, materiality—both grand and ordinary—opens a route of return, the oceanic fullness one feels while “waiting for the kettle to whistle.” Aaron Simon’s poetry whispers to me of what it means to be alive, really alive. Dodie Bellamy
  • There is a razor-thin crack between the world and Simon’s verse: that crack is language and that razor is in the hand of a poet at once vigurous and lost. This is a book of wisdom attentive only to the beauty that heals, but distracted, like all of us, by the beauty that hurts. Andrei Codrescu
  • Aaron Simon’s Rain Check Poems talk, sing and startle with deadpan elegance, practically reinventing the archetype of the dreamer as they unfold. Dreams beget dreams in other minds, light accumulates while passing through words, and a playfully alert visual sensibility syncs up with a subtle, frame-building prosody. I admire the offhand strangeness in these poems, the detours into beauty and assertion they propose, and the glimpses and passages of the world they amplify. It’s a gorgeous read, especially aloud, to yourself, in a public place somewhere. Anselm Berrigan