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“Maurya Simon’s The Enchanted Room [is] a first book that delves beneath the skin of the quotidian in search of latent magic. The title is a metaphor for the heart, the body, childhood, and memory—which Simon…envisions as architectural space. The book has considerable reach, beginning slowly and gathering strength toward the end. Along the way, there are folkloric tales; love lyrics; dramatic monologues; historical narratives; and symbolist, oneiric poems. In Simon’s world, a door is usually something other than the aluminum screened variety. The poems occasionally strike a surreal note, though the intention is not to unhinge reality but to reveal its mystical underpinnings…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…Simon’s gospel, simply put, is that everything—animate or inanimate—is potentially treasure.” –Alice Fulton, Poetry
“Much of the image-making in Maurya Simon’s first book, The Enchanted Room, is felicitous…The images are graceful, the cadences lovely; Ms. Simon has a sure sense of the musicality of line.” –Lynne McMahon, The New York Times Book Review
“In the emerging robotronic ethos, with the computer as God, [Simon’s] verses stand out in reassuring affirmation of some of the older values long cherished by classic poets, such as the love of nature and solitude, and a sensitivity and concern for fellow beings amidst the broil and turmoil of daily living.” —Jaiboy Joseph, Financial Express, New Delhi, India
“Alchemical, archetypal, and perfectly balanced like the five-cornered base on which the philosopher’s stone is said to rest, Maurya Simon’s The Enchanted Room takes us through a cosmology of the imagination.” —Sheila Coghill, Small Press