EARTH AFTER EARTH
from Lunar Chandelier Press, 2012, 60 pp
Toni Simon’s Earth
After Earth, like classic apocalyptic writing, not only offers oblique
prophecies of what’s to come, but captures the present, through the perspective
of its alchemical, twilight language and dreamlike art. This verbal/visual text portrays a midnight
world full of psychic threat yet how beautiful its demons and angels, its
“forest people”, “clairvoyant asteroids” and other denizens appear as they glow
fiercely within its Dantesque, black lit landscapes. The end may be nigh, but it’s sublime
--Jerome Sala
In her little book Earth After Earth Toni Simon has created
a universe that quietly reveals itself, as when in the solitude of dreaming we
fracture emotions into condensed images and wake to interpret them, only to
find that they've already changed shape. Each sentence is a revelation, as when
in the mind of reading we imagine sentences forming that take us to another
place. When mind, time, and eyes converge at a point of knowing then you can be
sure that "even in the dark we know ourselves to be inhabited."
--Kristin Prevallet
Earth After Earth
is an enigmatic prose poetry text which resonates with classic sci-fi futurism
and oddness, yet when attended to closely, provokes and informs us by imagining
the alternative realities of an altered present. Earth After Earth proposes that the other place and time is poetry--explored to the imaginal limits. Earth
After Earth is illustrated with Toni Simon’s quixotic black and white
drawings which figure as portholes to a dream.
—Kim Lyons
Surreal new-sentence
prescient-sci-fi psychedelia
--Nada Gordon (Third Factory/Notes to Poetry 2012)
Contradicta: Aphorisms
by Nick Piombino
Green Integer, 2010, 167pp
With over 80 illustrations by Toni Simon
available from SPD @ $12.95
