Practice, Restraint

Winner of the 2005 Alberta Prize. Laura Sims’s exquisite debut is the work of an organic synthesizer, one practiced in the restrained art of listening. Her poems exhibit an attenuation that is akin to devotion by means of maxim and miniaturization, she sorts and stacks the products of humanness. Memes and phonemes of a haiku-like fineness are thereby invited to break the surface of the page. Those pre-hung doors of the native state the return to a native, pre-eminent state wholly immanent, wise and wooly.