Wilderness

After watching a royal wedding on the streets of Paris at age 5, Maurya Simon scrawled her first poem. Decades later, she’s still at it, with an award-winning oeuvre that muses on everything from the origin of parentheses (in her chapbook A Brief History of Punctuation) to what lies beyond death (answer: “A fever of unknowing, a match-head struck in the darkness of the void. A blue door without a handle that suddenly swings open”). Simon, a UC Riverside professor emerita who was raised in Western Europe and Hermosa Beach by an artist mother and musicologist father, has also created monoprints and composed an opera libretto. She’s now working on a young adult detective novel about a diamond heist. Other new projects include a memoir about her dad, who taught at Cal Poly Pomona, and her 11th volume of poetry.

“Maurya Simon’s language is lush, dense, sensual, and framed by a dazzling intellect. In this her New and Selected Poems we come to see the full power of her symphonic sweep and the sheer dynamism of her compositional slant—riffs, play, improvisation, harmonic resonance—yet the resolve is always there, always a breathless moment. . . . Maurya Simon’s œuvre is a deliberate world of grace, awe, beauty, delight, and wonder. In these poems you will find rest, comfort, deep questions, some discomfort, but always joy. Read this book—you will be grateful for it.”—Chris Abani, author of Sanctificum and Hands Washing Water “The Wilderness is nothing short of astonishing. Maurya Simon is a poet for the ages, an exuberant chronicler of moments large and small who discovers at every turn new ways of illuminating the sum of her experience, and in this new and selected edition of work gathered over many decades she reveals herself to be in the grip of what Wallace Stevens called ‘the necessary angel of earth’—the one who helps us to see the world around us in all its resplendent glory.”—Christopher Merrill, author of Self-Portrait with Dogwood “Maurya Simon’s is one of the strongest, most humane, imaginative, compassionate, and flat-out brilliant voices of her generation.”—Richard Tillinghast