Cartographies

The poems in Cartographies travel new territory, exploring the heart’s changeable cartography and the soul’s uneven terrain. They map the familiar, sometimes astonishing, and always complex world of the poet’s native San Gabriel Mountains, as well as nearby Los Angeles, with its cultural richness and social/political tensions. Divided into four sections—The Soul, The Self, Mountains, The City— Cartographies investigates and fathoms our most profound relationships with time, nature, love, and death. In poem after poem, Simon finds meaning in unexpected locales, from a hospital AIDS ward to the “Rorschach” on a butterfly’s wings to a barrio bakery, and in the briefest of moments, evoked by the plaintive voice of a spider, or provoked by a breathless escape from an avalanche. With great clarity and eloquence, these poems record and dramatize the persistent paradoxes present in our daily lives, those interstices of yearning and mourning, fear and celebration, or anguish and amazement that reveal the deep wells and turbulence of human consciousness. With consummate craftsmanship and inner grace, Simon apprehends the elegiac within the purest moments of joy, and intimates catharsis within despair. She opens the mind’s windows to myriad small miracles provoked by the barest glimmers of wonder and hope.

Back Cover Endorsements for Maurya Simon's Cartographies

With poems that mean to “unravel the wind's calligraphies, / letter by letter, and spell myself into the world,” Maurya Simon continues to build a remarkable body of work, rich in its musical textures and generous in its inclusive gestures: “the dead love us,” she affirms, “with tacit tenderness.” If “the world… is a place of soul-making,” as Keats insisted, these poems both measure and advance our progress toward forging an animating principle that's spiritual, erotic, and resplendent with praise. In her lucidity and eloquence, Maurya Simon remains one of our best poets.

—Michael Waters

Cartographies is a read for anyone who loves poetry. You can love its carefully poised outsailings or its nimble shape or its buoyant, zesty voice that's enthusiastically into everything. I love it for the poet who writes wonderfully about dogs, about a tricky sister, about Burt Reynolds in the mall, about the Kuwaiti Zoo, all of which seems to support her saying “I do not like to think about my life.” That's what I most love, her feinting humor, a brassy woman whose life becomes a kind of navigational aid for the rest of us. These poems make me think I'd like to go to dinner with their author. Who wouldn't? The art here is in making a life luminous.

--Dave Smith

Maurya Simon is tenacious in her struggle to comprehend the labyrinthine paths we travel between keening and dancing in a dangerous world. When her language does both, keen and dance, the results are beautifully urgent.

--Dorothy Barresi, The Gettysburg Review

Simon tries to see through things, as if they were composed of light rather than matter. And her vision leads the reader into a world rendered luminous, its radiance sharply, almost painfully defined. [Her] gospel, simply put, is that everything—animate or inanimate—is potentially treasure.

--Alice Fulton, Poetry