Thirty First Bird Review

Edward Simon's Online Store 

Check out our awesome new store at Cafe Press 31st Bird Merchandis

We are selling cool T-shirts, mugs, beer steins (of course), post-cards, greeting cards, posters, prints, tiles, tote-bags and briefcases. Most products have our snazy mystical bird logo, and some select products contain our "Guide to Seventeenth Century English Heretics." That way you will always be prepared should you encounter an "Adamite, Libertine or Iesuit." (Check under the Collection Plate tab if you are curious as to what this looks like). Some wonderous products actually have both our logo and our handy English Civil War era guide. Everything is well made and reasonably priced, and all purchases will directly help in the printing of our inaugural issue.

"On Daring to Eat the Pear" engages narratives of a heretical nature. In the debut poems of this book, ancient blasphemies, modern iconoclasms and the remnants of dead faith all commingle. Simon attempts to tell both old and new stories in a language that is at times profound, and at times enigmatic. Whether writing about the Chinese poet Li-Bao, the Mongolian monk Rabban bar Sauma, the Jewish mystic Isaac Lauria, or the doomed English King Charles I, Simon mines alike the obscure and the famous of history to write poems that are only confessional to the nature of reality. In these pages you will find stories in poetry ranging from a blues singer named Cadmon (or Kadmon) Delph who generates reality with his guitar, to the surreal and magically realist story of idol smashers being chased away from a dissolved monastery by a screaming, burning statue of Christ. Simon's work consciously doesn't imitate the staid conventions of modern lyric poetry in either intent, structure or theme. The narratives are all unified by a deep seated desire to find a new verse, one that is able to explicate the many functions of our post-faith religious condition. Simon's poems are prayers to a God who isn't there.

In his second volume of poetry, Edward Simon examines the radical poetry and prayers of a radical faith. In the metaphysics of this book God isn't always real, but that doesn't mean that we can't pray to him. In the new theology of a new religion, aesthetics becomes the guiding force in faith. As in his earlier book "Daring to Eat the Pear," Simon unflinchingly looks at the complexities of a belief that exist between fidelity and atheism. In "The Heretic's Book of Blasphemous Prayer" poems are offered up to the core of being, and iconoclastic religious beliefs are investigated from every possible direction.