Praise for Night Gears (Wolsak and Wynn, 2010)
From the “whittled towns” of Saskatchewan to the song of the “red-breasted delivery truck,” Bren Simmers uses her unique ability to draw connections between rural and urban, between the divine and the absurd, to create dazzling poetry. In Night Gears, Simmers’ first collection, her lines demand the reader’s attention, whether she is cataloguing roadkill on a trip to the arctic, revelling in the intensity of a thunderstorm at a fire lookout, or unfolding the silent pain of small-town life.
“Simmers has quite a few truly impressive poems in Night Gears…her poems are genuinely enjoyable lyric meditations on travel, landscape and, sometimes, urbanity…She deserves praise for her adept conjuring of this neo-Romantic, yet modern, persona.” — J.A. Weingarten, The Malahat Review, Summer 2011
“Brimming with “side of the road wonder” and equipped with a discerning intelligence, Bren Simmers goes panning for gold in the day-to-day and the out-of-the-way and considers both the gravel and the glitter she finds there. A generous spirit rescues the moments we’re most likely to forget, the places we’re least likely to visit.” — Sue Sinclair
“Whether she’s attending to the workings at the heart of small towns, or the archaic mechanism that is a moose stopped at the side of the road, Bren Simmers is attuned to the intricate machinery of the world, within and without us. Here is a poetry committed to the human and the natural, and to the intersection between.”
— Rhea Tregebov
Purchase Night Gears at your local independent bookstore
or buy Night Gears online
Cover image by Nikki McClure
Bren Simmers 