"Let me live content in the vicinity / of my undiscovered novelty," Jane Simon sagely writes in her splendid debut collection, Intimacy, Obstacles, and Miracles. She illuminates the profound paradoxes she observes with events as ordinary as getting a haircut or glimpsing a well-trained dog. Simon is a deft portraitist, using her piquant observations and quick lines to investigate a wide circle of characters. The reflections in her poems are at once majestic, experienced, yet humble. This fascinating combination of qualities makes sense when one discovers that the poet-psychiatrist was once a forensic physician - a poet at home in a medical examiner's lab, yet who made the leap to become a physician of the mind. As a result, the poems in Intimacy, Obstacles, and Miracles make a sparkling testament to staying curious about every aspect of existence.
-Molly Peacock, author, The Analyst: Poems and The Widow's Crayon Box
Why Poetry?
How the irrationality of reality weaves itself
into a mysterious fabric, never woven before.
You are an artist, a maker!
How often do you become the center, the creator
that elucidates the miracle of each moment.
You are the iridescent hummingbird in flight.
Come join me to fly in fragrant air.
To soar high means each of us could first
save oneself and then, the whole world.
Jane Simon has ascended the ladder from pathology to psychiatry to poetry. She is the author of Who's Ever Enough and A Toolbox of Blogs: Integrating Psyche and Society, as well as two illustrated books, The Cabala of Animals and A Toolbox of Paradox. Her poetry has appeared in Arizona Quarterly, Black Buzzard Review, Columbia Poetry Review, and The RavensPerch, among others. An alumna of Barnard College and Temple University School of Medicine, she lives and practices psychiatry in Manhattan.
