Rain Check Poems by Aaron Simon

Aaron Simon's lines feel like strokes of a pre-CBS Jazzmaster. Not plastic. More like rosewood with at least a Gibson tuneOmatic bridge. A brrruummm alliteration where each word-note contains the artful play of improv and composition colliding. Aaron Simon is a good band whose record is killing it on the deck these days.

—Thurston Moore

Aaron Simon’s Rain Check Poems talk, sing and startle with deadpan elegance, practically reinventing the archetype of the dreamer as they unfold. Dreams beget dreams in other minds, light accumulates while passing through words, and a playfully alert visual sensibility syncs up with a subtle, frame-building prosody. I admire the offhand strangeness in these poems, the detours into beauty and assertion they propose, and the glimpses and passages of the world they amplify. It's a gorgeous read, especially aloud, to yourself, in a public place somewhere.

—Anselm Berrigan

Rain Check Poems keenly evokes the loss which our entry into the symbolic order thrusts us, that sense of yearning when the sensual and the relational slip into the lacunae of language. Throughout these subtle yet seductive poems, materiality—both grand and ordinary—opens a route of return, the oceanic fullness one feels while “waiting for the kettle to whistle.” Aaron Simon’s poetry whispers to me of what it means to be alive, really alive.

—Dodie Bellamy

There is a razor-thin crack between the world and Simon's verse: that crack is language and that razor is in the hand of a poet at once vigurous and lost. This is a book of wisdom attentive only to the beauty that heals, but distracted, like all of us, by the beauty that hurts.

—Andrei Codrescu

Aaron Simon is the author of Carrier (Insurance Editions, 2006), Periodical Days (Green Zone Editions, 2007), and Senses Himself (Green Zone Editions, 2014). His poems have appeared in several publications, including Like Musical Instruments: 83 Contemporary American Poets (Broadstone Books, 2014), Shiny, Exquisite Corpse, Sal Mimeo, Across the Margin, Nowhere, and Harriet the Blog. He studied poetry and philosophy at The New School in NYC, and has lived between San Francisco and Brooklyn since 1999.

www.aaronsimon.com

Book Information:

· Paperback: 56 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-216-7