Now [Paperback]

PRAISE for NOW

The abundance of Tom Simmons' imagination is matched by his tireless intellectual curiosity. A copious, ardent, richly musical book of poetry.

~ Robert Pinsky

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Thomas Simmons is a poet of astonishing lines that stun the page with informed candor. He has many voices and forms, all consistent with a learned poet who looks and photos world events and passion historically in ancient, modern, and experimental passages. He is the minds astronomer. He gazes at eternal heavens fallen yet strolling on earth. I expect many new word constellations will be carrying his signature. His pen is as sharp as his eye.

Willis Barnstone, Author

Poets of the Bible: from Solomon to John of Revelation

Fred Cody Life Achievement Award

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Thomas Simmons possesses an uncanny ability to weave together in his poems elements of the past, present, and future, refracted through details that are at once quotidian and eternal. Now offerscompelling testimony about a complicated moment in history, in the form of one man's searing indictment of the mistakes, his own and others, that have defined his singular time on earth. This book will endure.

Christopher Merrill

Self-Portrait with Dogwood?

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There are two ways to transmute personal suffering: one is through spiritual practice; the other is through art. Tom Simmons wholeheartedly chooses the latter route. In this long-awaited new collection, he dives down the rabbit hole of a life suffused in deep personal disappointment to wrest from it the brilliant shards of universal longingand ghostly light. With each shift, he writes, what looks like a common life, fractured and sad, becomes an altarpiece of infinite regress... fully manifest in possibility. To accomplish this Houdini act on an altogether ordinary life (though perhaps one more honored in the breach than in the observance) requires daring, objectivity, and a finely hon