Simples

Poetry. Women's Studies. "With SIMPLES, KateLynn Hibbard has created a medicine chest of poems, a book that transports us back in time to search out the remedies and inner strength necessary to survive a hardscrabble life on the frontier plains. It is a sweeping portrait of a time and a region, one that offers an especially keen insight into the lives of women and children--bringing historical erasures and overlooked history into a brighter relief. SIMPLES recognizes that the intricate patterns of the past are woven into our contemporary lives, though it may be 'pummeled as the wheat / Is by the rain' and that's why it makes 'good sense to attempt a revolution.'"--Brian Turner




"SIMPLES is inflected by the Bible as well as by personal accounts of settling the Midwest (with the shocking erasures of witness). KateLynn Hibbard tells us that at the frontier, women were workers and visionaries, makers, namers, travelers; they embodied knowledge, experienced violence and lust, gave birth. They were indifferent, wise, sensual. Women who helped, learned to weave, make lace, were immigrants from Germany and elsewhere, were Native American, without names, made baskets, lost their families and language, were called 'primitive.' Most women buried their children, their friends, their sisters; they suffered and, sometimes, they thrived. I loved Hibbard's unflinching book!"--Hilda Raz




"KateLynn Hibbard has written a book of remedy and release on the prairies of old. Poems in the voices of women who survive the requirements of their lives as subservient wives, daughters, laborers reveal another life of the settler colonial era. These women code their communications to liberate one another from despair, abuse, unwanted pregnancy, and the heartbreak of lovelessness or longing for love that cannot be. This is not the pioneer woman claiming the prairie, but the prairie claiming the women it teaches to survive."--Heid Erdrich




"In SIMPLES, KateLynn Hibbard--part Willa Cather, part Laura Ingalls Wilder, part Edgar Lee Masters, part Amy Clampitt--delivers a book-length sequence of poems set in the nineteenth-century plains. Comprehensive in perspective, masterful in method, SIMPLES focuses on the experiences of women, both settlers and displaced tribal people, peaking perhaps in the stunning crown of sonnets 'The Prairie of Her Body,' but everywhere providing answers to a question another poem magically invokes: 'What window to look through, if not through me?'"--T.R. Hummer