Poetry. Ann Simon's extraordinary writing moves deftly among genres of abbreviation: a diary of poignant impressions, the crystallization of nearly lost moments, aphorism, prose poem, and elegy. She writes, 'I collect loose approximations of forms, ' and in many ways this collection gathers the loose forms she crafted, as living tribute and testimony to a writer who sought linguistic forms to carry, without quelling, the sharpness of impressions from childhood, love, humour, and loss. If the forms are loose, it is because something still lives there, requiring room in language to breathe. Characteristically, she wrote, 'I crave obituaries for their power of generalization.' The sudden capacity and substitutability of form makes the life that is gone available to those who live on--surprisingly. These writings are so many fragments of living moments past, ceded to language that, in turn, gives partial forms for living on.--Judith Butler

Ann Simon owns a certain distance, from which she sees a paradoxical, funny, sometimes endearingly simple world. She must have been born with the poetic organ present also in Max Jacob, the founder of the prose poem. Exalted, tragic, and bemused, she registers the objects of her gaze in perfect aphorisms. 'Her aphorisms are good enough to enter the common tongue, ' we are advised, and, indeed, Ann Simon's are. The presence of beauty suffuses her poetry, an elusive beauty that originates in her 'default melancholy, ' but is, like Ann, easy 'to cheer up, ' a sweet poetic gift granted to few. Such a funny, wise, and memorable poet!--Andrei Codrescu

In THIS LAYER OF PLUSH, the prose line becomes the bearer of what Ann Veronica Simon calls 'an aftertaste to the present.' Less proleptic than it is brightly saturated with phenomena, Simon's line is as in love with deadpan detail as it is haunted by autobiography. Every word tells its own story--literally, as in such catalog works as 'A Biography of My Vocabulary, ' where each entry ('hedgehog, ' 'hooo doggie, ' 'Huey') dilates on an episode of her Bildungsroman-esque lexicon. 'There's this default melancholy, ' she says, naming the bedrock currency of both experience and memory. But the line persists, and for the pursuing reader (as for Simon herself), 'cashiers in a good mood' make all the difference.--Jean Day