With beauty, love, and authenticity, Jessica Genia Simon writes about the multi-generational trauma of Holocaust survivors, the unrelenting yearning to cradle the heart of a mother and a baby, and other challenges that define her. And yet, her deeply-felt poems brim with hope and wonder. Simon’s connection to the natural word, her sensuous musings about honeysuckle nectar, full-throated daffodils, and crooning robins, ground and uplift us at the same time. I’ll continue to re-read Simon’s work, because her poetry implores us to shape and name what matters most in our lives and beyond.
—Michelle Brafman, author of Washing the Dead and Swimming with Ghosts
In Built of All I Shape and Name, Jessica Simon writes powerfully and without self-pity about trying to understand her mother. Simon also writes honestly about her miscarriages. She observes and empathizes with birds and trees and gives trees a voice. These poems will intrigue, move, and perhaps enlighten the reader.
—Marge Piercy, poet, novelist, memoirist
Jessica Genia Simon is a poet navigating the fierce terrain of womanhood and loss. The poems shift from crocuses and maple trees to theatrical interior soliloquies with blossoming epiphanies. Simon's poems are the politically astute observations of both a daughter and a global citizen. By rooting herself in lineage and being uprooted by both visible and invisible losses, Simon guides us through the difficult and lyrical journey with humility and wisdom.
—Regie Cabico, Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam Champion, three-time National Poetry Slam Finalist
Jessica Simon’s tender and intimate new collection is aptly entitled Built of All I Shape and Name. In her book, she explores the challenges presented by life’s cycle of birth, love, and death. Writing in both free verse and form, Simon reveals her sensitivity to the pains and joys of family life as well as to humanity’s deep connection to the natural world. Simon’s poems, rich with imagery, move from New York to Spain to Israel. Simon’s wide-ranging collection helps the reader to express her own sorrows and joys and provides a deeply satisfying emotional experience not to be missed.
—Ellen Sazzman, author of The Shomer
Jessica Genia Simon’s poems weave family, trauma, the natural world, and the self, complete with all their suffering and beauty. Her poems give voice to the raw humanness of our time. She is a poet who you will want to know.
—Carly Sachs, author of the steam sequence and editor of the why and later
