The Raindrop's Gospel

 

“In these poems that hover somewhere between the lyric and the narrative, between aubade and the troubadour’s song and the griot’s incantatory orature, between Virgil’s joy and Horace’s reasoned arguments, Simon charts a path of transformation and possibility, where the true redemption is the realization that all love is light. This baptism is for the soul to accept that the body will be divine but only on its own terms, and this is not shame, this is not sin. Scholars of American literature will hear all the echoes of Hawthorne’s ‘The Scarlet Letter’ and its cautionary note, one that Chaucer sounds against Bunyan’s ‘Pilgrim’s Progress,’ the caution, relevant in our times, is that the idea of purity, and any attempts to force it, is the true tyranny. In this way, Simon’s book echoes the message that has been spooling through history every time the profane and the divine collide; a ripple across the soul’s calm.” Chris Abani from the Afterword