This really is a powerful collection. –rob mclennan
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The poems in The Work engage with the work of love and loss and the hope that we might somehow learn to carry our portion of grief. Simmers writes of churning in an accumulation of losses—the sudden death of her father, the descent of her mother into dementia, her sister-in-law’s terminal illness—and of the work of slowly making wholeness out of brokenness. Her writing fosters a vulnerability and wit that sidestep easier tropes, a reminder that healing often comes through saying “Hello” and “Yes”; a realization that “all this noticing / was love.”
More about The Work
The Work is a book that holds articulations of loss so completely that, as a reader, one hopes that the process might allow any reader a way into their own losses, and perhaps, the author, a way from which to move somehow beyond. This really is a powerful collection.
Bren Simmers’ The Work treats grief and suffering as part of the labour of being human, rather experiences we master and overcome. And rather than easy confessional and its attendant melodrama, the poems are built with imagistic precision. They are built with both formal restraint and experimentation, the latter of which never feels like a gimmick but as necessary to a poem’s unfolding.
—Randy Lundry, CBC Poetry Prize
