by Jan Freeman
Nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry.
"Simon Says is just gorgeous. I needed
this book! It's wonderful. I will talk about it. I will give copies to people.
Jan Freeman has written an extraordinary piece of work"
— Dorothy Allison
"Jan Freeman, a daughter of Dickinson and Stein, pursues her celebration
of vision: solitary, insistent, eccentric. Simon Says
is a peculiarly American and feminine pleasure."
— Carole Maso
"If happiness, tenderness, grandiosity, etc. killed the cat, and the cat
likes it better that way, what can we expect to die from and will we like it better
also? And if the brassiere is in the tree, where are the rest of our things? Will
wood save us along with the memory of scent? Is there a simple cure for comfort?
And when will the angel arrive with convection in her pocket? It's all in the
cadences."
— C.D. Wright
"To my mind, Simon Says earns Freeman the
right to call herself one of the great lesbian mythmakers, for she turns her
encantatory voice that which is essentially, although not exclusively, lesbian:
mantras, romantic and decidedly sexual loving, dogs and cats, and nature. Her work
is sometimes expansive, sometimes rhythmic, sometimes carefully controlled, and
always deeply thoughtful. Ironically, though, the myths in
Simon Says arise without even the utterance of words
like lesbian; they reside in the lesbian rather than insist upon
it, a distinction that bespeaks Freeman's commitment to the poem as a kind of
melodic activist movement. Freeman's reviewers have consistently invoked Stein and
Dickinson to characterize her poetry. True, but too easy. Freeman works too hard
for that; each and every one of her poems is both unique and uniquely connected to
the whole poem that is the book Simon Says…. Freeman's work is held together
by the sheer force of her images rather than by conventional syntax and punctuation,
or even by poetic lineage…. These poems need to be read, savored, returned to
time and again (perhaps we obsessive Type A's should, for instance, return to
Freeman's ‘Morning Mantra’ each day). My suggestion? If you're a lesbian (oh hell,
even if you're not) take Freeman to bed with you for a few months, read a poem a
night, bask in its complexity and fullness, then spend the final months of your
ninth life loving it again."
— The Lesbian Review of Books
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