Words that can’t sit still: review of Warsaw Bikini and interview with author Sandra Simonds
The Jerusalem Post, January 30, 2009
To move through the pages of Sandra Simonds’s collection of poetry, Warsaw Bikini, is to move with intent, with care, as though you were walking through a minefield.
That’s not to say Warsaw Bikini, Simonds’s first full-length work, isn’t a pleasurable read. The title is a reflection of the range of the content – it varies from lead to helium, from apocalyptic and Holocaust imagery to pop culture references, often within the boundaries of one poem. The reader gets a sense of Simonds’s supreme comfort with the form – lines vary in length, some poems are dense, some are light and airy, some zip along, some move with a deliberate thickness. But the reader also gets an overriding sense of her discomfort with much of the content, and the resulting dissonance and tension is irresistible.
This friction is a driving force to the Pushcart Prize-nominated Simonds. “I feel that my poems are anxious,” she says, “and a large part of this anxiety is historical and familial.”
