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“‘Every good ghost story begins with a girl / in the dark,’ Mary Simmons writes in her witchy, resonant debut. And so begins her own collection, which is haunted by the spirits of mythological women ranging from Persephone and Eurydice to Ophelia and Lot’s wife. Invoking an Irish pagan goddess as her muse, Simmons sings of ancestry, girlhood, and the mysterious power of the feminine. She conjures a supernatural world of omens and auguries—of whispered ghost stories and dead women sleepwalking through the mossy woods. Set beneath a mourning autumn moon, to the tune of bullfrogs, rain, and wind, Simmons’s poems unfold in forests teeming with owls, spiders, crows, and rivers that know your name. Against this uncanny backdrop, Simmons’s speaker plumbs the grief of embodiment, uttering ‘To wear this body each day is a taxidermy / of blunted knives.’ Yet even in the depths of darkness, poems reveal the ways that ‘grief / can be beauty, can be tenderness.’ With each poem, Simmons—a diviner—summons a queer, woman-centered dream world I never want to leave.”
—Alyse Knorr, author of Wolf Tours
“Mary Simmons is a poet turned inside-out. She goes outside to get inside. Mother, Daughter, Augur is a phenomenological study of the self-evicted self: ‘pond-swallowed, we do not recognize / ourselves.’ And thank heavens for that: It’s unrecognition that electrifies this book. Simmons moves in opposition to the tired arc of a clean and carefully concluded poem and hits us instead with a celebration of the mess. Here, metaphor and madness share a seat. Here, the human being of the twenty-first century is indistinguishable from a ‘downed tree.’ Everything is conscious, and everything is free. All we can do is let go of the umbrella of convention and get wet—until the sealskin that these poems spread over us renders that protection obsolete.”
—Larissa Szporluk, author of Virginals
“Mary Simmons’s debut collection not only plays in language but also in myth and in fable. Simmons’s speakers use language to transform themselves into a body fashioned from wing or salt or mud or bone because to be a body cast of unearthed things makes the body these speakers exist in untethered like bird or wolf or rain. It is through this assemblage of the body that these poems call to you, that these poems breathe into you, that these poems build a nest in you. What this book does is open itself to you, the reader, and summon you to obsess yourself in its curiosities. It’s the unloosed language in these poems that I love and find so inviting. Mother, Daughter, Augur gives you a world ‘Blooming, a strange carillon.’ Yes, you will want to follow the language-bells ringing across these pages.”
—Tyler Michael Jacobs, author of The Weight of Drought
“‘There are yet other ways of becoming,’ writes Mary Simmons in her debut collection’s invocation poem. And many ways to tell a truth. Simmons’s poems place women, their bodies, their feathers, in each and every niche, every transformation a new home. The language thrums for answers, embeds them in every drop. These voices want us to stay—and we will.”
—Abigail Cloud, author of Sylph