Stranger

A mother's illness and early death is only the beginning of the story of Stranger, Laura Sims' second collection. This is a death whose presence and particulars are felt and inscribed, and which achieves an agency, a purview, a resistance. We feel the loss from all angles, even as Sims' episodic, quicksilver narrative moves up and through mother's life and its incompletion, her apprehension in the face of death, a surviving child's guilt and the adult child's attempts at comprehension of who/what the mother is, now that she's gone. In the end there is a hopeful hopelessness in approaching Eternity. Laura Sims' delicacy and agility are equal are equal to her forbearance, and all are up to the remarkable task of recounting a life and afterlife.

LAURA SIMS is the author of Practice, Restraint, recipient of the 2005 Fence Books Alberta Prize. Her book reviews and essays have appeared in Boston Review, New England Review, Rain Taxi, and The Review of Contemporary Fiction, and she has recently published poems in the journals Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, CAB/NET, and Crayon. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches writing at Baruch College in Manhattan.