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Today's poem is "North of Stinson Beach"
from River Bound

C & R Press

Brian Simoneau grew up in Lowell, Massachusetts, and graduated from Amherst College and the University of Oregon. His poems have appeared in Boulevard, Crab Orchard Review, The Georgia Review, Mid-American Review, and other journals. He lives in Connecticut with his wife and two daughters.

Books by Brian Simoneau:

Other poems on the web by Brian Simoneau:
Two poems
Three poems
"Something So Simple"
"Walden"
"Working the Garden"
"Poem in which My Brother and I Manage Not to Laugh Out Loud"
"Watch the River Flow"
"One to Another"
"A Constant Reminder"
"Poem with a Guitar"
Two poems
"What You Learn"
"Blue Hills, Early December"
"Tonight I Walk in the Shadow of a Tree"

Brian Simoneau on Twitter.

About River Bound:

"No detail is too small for Simoneau’s gaze, which takes each nail and board and beam surrounding it into account with a carpenter’s knack for shape, structure, precision. Through humor and elegiac storytelling, River Bound chronicles the ups and downs of blue-collar American life in Lowell, Massachusetts, and elsewhere—creating a simultaneously beautiful and apocalyptic vision of the future in which ‘the moon slides behind the empty mills / as we wait, watching for stars to come down.'"
—Dorianne Laux

"These powerful, diary-like meditations are a sort of psychic conditioning for the speaker—and there is a lot of conditioning to do: death of the father, death of the New England mill town—the only certainty, uncertainty. The lyricism is superb, and subtle, but lyric it is. What better place to discover song than in your own hometown? Brian Simoneau has done just that in River Bound. This is impressive, intense poetry."
—Arthur Smith

"Brian Simoneau is a rarity in his generation for the way he combines precision of feeling with an idiom that is taut, musical, & full of linguistic subtlety. Flashy verbal poets seem a little overheated, a little foolish, next to his intelligent restraint. His affection for his native ground—the old New England mill towns he grew up in—is dry-eyed, rueful, and hard earned. His father’s gas station, the mill workers of the 19th century, & the often hardscrabble life lived in these towns today inform but don’t limit his vision of how ‘Life passes at the speed of grief.’ He has written as fine a first book as you could hope to read."
—Tom Sleigh



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