Collisions and Transformations
(New and Selected Poems, 1975-1991)

Coffee House Press, Minneapolis

These poems uncover the music in the names of streets in San Francisco, in the controlled passion of jazz rhythms, and the mystery of female sexuality, using chant-rhythm beats to create diaphanous layers of harmony and meaning.

Collisions and Transformations reads like a wind chime. In the first section, “Street Bleats,” poems influenced by Gertrude Stein take us on a language and sound journey down the streets of San Francisco. In the last section “Alive,” fish heads, jay-walking, and postcards become vehicles for a confirmation of the poet’s commitment to change and transformation, to the ability of words to rise and stir. In poems that in turn sing loudly, and hum inwardly, Collisions and Transformations explores with an enchanting musical quality relationships to family, society, and spirituality.

“These are wonderful poems, fresh and original, with serious content as well as humor and charm.”
- Nancy Peters, City Lights Books

“Leslie Simon’s poetry is made of the perpetual motion of rachmones (Yiddish for “compassion”) as it is nourished by the African-American dimension in working-class life.”
- Jack Hirschman, former San Francisco Poet Laureate

“Simon chisels love poetry with images as raw and genuine as Marianne Moore would have them.”
- Richard Holinger, Another Chicago Magazine

High Desire
Wingbow Press, Berkeley

“Simon is full of solemn tenderness, an ordered pain, giving dignity to our transience. How often do a poet’s words snuggle and soothe, tease, and proposition you to feel?”
- Ntozake Shange, author of for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf

“Leslie Simon writes as a woman who chose sex as one path to liberation/enlightenment. Women like us used to be called all kinda names. But it’s OK. Now, we just tell the story and they call us writers.”
- Alta, Shameless Hussy Press

“[High Desire] is written in the womb of experience, guided by the erotic seeking fusion, orgasm,with its language, its content, its meaning…”
- Alma Luz Villanueva, author of The Ultraviolet Sky

I Rise / You Riz / We Born
Artaud’s Elbow, Berkeley (out of print)

“Simon has invented her own grammar.”
- Richard Silbert, Associate Editor Poetry Flash

“[A] strong spirit…hovers within every word and rhythm.”
- Bill Vartnaw, Small Press Review

Jazz/ is for white girls, too
Poetry for the People Press, San Francisco (out of print)

“Leslie Simon is a poet who performs her work with the intensity, subtle rhythmic sense, and sure grace of a jazz musician. She makes words do things that you would swear they just could not do.”
- Brown Miller, Small Press Review