Further Problems with Pleasure

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY APR 3, 2017

Death is never far away in the saturated Gothic atmosphere of this latest darkly irreverent collection from Simonds (Steal It Back). In Simonds's poems there is a frequent parallel between bodily want and a kind of spiritual crisis: "Devout as I am the devouring's/ stronger." Though many of the book's poems take place in versions of the South, the book's middle section, "Baudelaire Variations," feels like a fantastical or cinematic catalog of destruction inhabited by a character who seems to be part devil and part companion. The book's title repeats, refrain-like, in a series of poems where problems pile and threaten to turn at a moment's notice: "The problem with pleasure/ is that you need more and more of it to force it to/ be more measurable and before you know it, it flips/ to torture." These poems unfurl with profane observations competing for attention with declarative assertions on the absurdities of love and literature and 21st-century living. Simonds possesses an aptitude for metaphor, and her speakers self-govern even when the world grows murky or difficult: "Some people call it self-destructiveness/ but I call it love, statelessness,/ the anarchy of a flood of flowers." As "the stage set/ of the Anthropocene gets all shot up like a gas station," Simonds reports the damage amid the ruins.