New Book

Will likely bring this new work out in about a week, with a few minor changes and improvements to the cover pictured here.

The cover photo is by RP Thomas, himself a resident of Talent, Oregon, but not a character in "The Talent Poems," because those people are all fictional, and RP is very much a real dude.

I designed the book of course, because I do everything around here.

The poems?  You'll have to read them and decide for yourself because what I really know about writing is limited to what I know.

This is what Buddy Dooley says the book is about:

The founder of Round Bend Press Books brings forth another volume of poetry exploring the political and social plight of the common man. In the first set of poems, "Nightscape in Empire," Mr. Simons explores universal themes of resistance and personal choice, themes of political and personal upheaval that play out in the ordinary act of everyday living and survival. These are protest songs rooted in rebellion and an ultimately hopeful vision of what Mr. Simons imagines a more just world would look like. "The Talent Poems" is a fictional narrative centered on the lives of a small group of small-town citizens in Talent, Oregon. In creating the characters that inhabit the town and his poems, the writer experiments with archetypes and a genre storytelling form that is in equal parts imaginative biography and social satire.

Whatever that means.


TS