Palace of Rubble

Kyra Simone

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Like traditional methods of salting, pickling, drying, and smoking, Palace of Rubble saves transitory substance from expiration. From the stuff we unfold in the morning and throw in the recycling bin at night, Simone coaxes the rhythms of cyclical life, the patterns and variations on patterns that define the sphere of the daily, that baseline on which extraordinary events and crises exert their pressure.  The world she constructs is recognizable, textured, gently humorous—but also luminously, piercingly exact, possessed of the strangeness of seeing something for the first or the last time—a lamp store in Chinatown is “a gallery of lights all blinking in dissonant rays of color,” the disassembling of a famous church that will be put together a few miles up the road is rendered via “the villagers holding pieces of it in their hands as they head over the hill in a great procession into the distance.”  As the author herself puts it, these texts retain “a distant ember of the world from which they were first generated,” an effect that can feel for the reader like peering into a place that is both familiar and unknown, gazing at this place through the blur and distance implied by the passage of large swathes of time, physical displacement or shifts in ontological perspective.

            ^{Alexandra Kleeman}

^{Kyra Simone is a troubadour of her generation. A real one. Commentators speak of the Millennials so glibly, but this book is a record of the inner landscape we’ve left for those called Millennials—and it is we, my generation, who’ve left it for them. Palace of Rubble is a historical document. It’s what they see when they look out the window and what they see when they look in the mirror, at the same time, on the same page. Simone teaches us not to expect a destination or a helping hand. Her poetry is a precise description. She sees beauty everywhere, but that doesn’t make anything alright. She’s shown us what’s going on and makes us see it through a verbal force and enchantment that compels us to read further, with texts that wield the power to conjure a different but coherent universe, and in very few words. The closest I’ve seen to these “palaces” is Rimbaud, except Rimbaud never had a body and these are written from the body. There’s a strength here, the strength of an artist claiming her ground. No matter what. It’s the “no matter what” that is better than hope or promises. I find this work extraordinary.}

            ^{Michael Ventura}