All text from My God Is This a Man by Laura Sims, Fence Books 2014
Original cover art for My God Is This is Man by Alessandro Guttenberg
Tag clouds are designed to show the frequency of word usage in a text by enlarging words based on how many times they occur. Microclimate Reviews, however, are hand-selected tag clouds that operate like weather systems, turbulent and resonate across the text. Frequency therefore becomes a microclimate in which one’s personal selection intuits a visual and spatial map of the verbal atmospheres entangled in the pages.
Laura Sims is the author of three books of poetry: My god is this a man, Stranger, and Practice, Restraint (Fence Books); her fourth collection, Staying Alive, is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse in 2016. She edited Fare Forward: Letters from David Markson, a book of her correspondence with the celebrated experimental novelist (powerHouse Books), and has also published five chapbooks of poetry. Her work was included in the anthology, The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century, and individual poems have recently appeared in the journals: Aufgabe, Black Clock, Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, Crayon, and Denver Quarterly. She has published book reviews and essays in Boston Review, Evening Will Come, Jacket, New England Review, Rain Taxi and The Review of Contemporary Fiction.
Sims’s first book, Practice, Restraint, was awarded the 2005 Fence Books Alberta Prize, and in 2006, she received a JUSFC Creative Artists Exchange Fellowship to live in Tokyo. Sims is a graduate of the College of William and Mary. She received a Master of Fine Arts from University of Washington in 2000, and she is now an adjunct professor of creative writing and literature at NYU-SCPS. She has been a featured writer for the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog, and has been a co-editor of Instance Press with poets Elizabeth Robinson, Susanne Dyckman, and Beth Anderson since 2009. She lives with her family in Brooklyn.