Praise for Kevin Simmonds and Mad for Meat
“Here is an artist and activist for our generation, weaned on the academia that today’s waning poetry audiences demand, but grounded in the Stonewall generation’s ethos of political and sexual liberation.
In this way, Simmonds is more like James Broughton, Essex Hemphill, and the lesser-known Richard Ronan than any poet who’s emerged in the last twenty years.”
— Lambda Literary
“This collection is not kind or nice, but the brutality of his honesty, the blunt force of his handling of subject matter, and most importantly, his emotional transparency, make this strong collection incredibly effective and worth reading and rereading.”
— The Rumpus
"Kevin Simmonds’ poems are full of precise, vivid details and haunting images,
like this description of the parish priest: ‘I remember the tie-dye chasuble /
of your last Easter / its burnt orange & brown silk / flooding the aisle as you stepped / from the altar to tell us the marvel / of resurrection & life of the world
to come.’ Or this description of buying a sweet ice dessert as a child: ‘Miss Pearl would open the door halfway / so I could tell her which flavor / & her smoke- cured contralto would sing / Hold on, baby ... my quarter passed into her thick-lined hands / long nails jaundiced by smokes.’ Simmonds is an accomplished musician, so it’s no wonder these poems sing ... [and] are brave, rich, disturbing, tender and a tribute to the human spirit.” — Ellen Bass
“Piercing the veil of a culture of silence, Kevin Simmonds brilliantly fuses quiet meditative traditions with a courageous impulse to dare beyond the boundaries of convention, to combine the bel canto of Italian art songs with the dynamic energy of James Brown; the tranquility of the zen masters with the fire and heat of the enraptured body. This is divine poetry — holy in the body, holy in the mind and holy in its heart.” — D. A. Powell
“At once personal and public, grounded and spiritual, all the poems in this collection are questions with no easy answers...In the opening poem, Simmonds tells us, ‘we began as trees / no wonder we ache / for wine-filled branches’ and by the end of the book, my branches were heavy with treasure — lines I don’t want to let go of like ‘even the soft ambulance / of a man’s body’ from one of several poems about his father or ‘I’m a blue silence / a closed mouth’ from Traded Moons,
a sequence on sex trafficking.”
— Seni Seneviratne
