Poetically Correct

In his signature economical style, Terrance Simon invites readers into the rural South and the dramas of the inhabitants. Through his spare, stoic, and at times spectral form of storytelling, he depicts lives limited by privation yet buoyed by dreams of grief, resignation, awe, death, and joy abide in his work. Simon is wed to realism and it's these realism that lend his portraits a singular sensitivity and clear-eyed register. Poetically Correct is a collection of short poems that comes on like a deadpan phalanx system unlearning itself while crashing resignation into the boards and pulling the rug out from under certainty line by line. But certainty is not simply replaced by uncertainty; an angular, witty openness accumulates across Simon's poem, making it excellent company. That openness also lends itself to the poem's capacity to build the kind of necessarily enigmatic space love requires to fend off the grinding mob- vacuum that is contemporary American life these days.