Linda Simone’s timely collection, The River Will Save Us, explores the distinctly American question: Where are we from, and who are we if where we live isn’t our hometown? Using her own experiences and those of a Japanese family whose lives in Texas were upended by Pearl Harbor, Simone’s luminous poems both mourn— “how hard to belong where you aren’t from”—and offer hope— “Who can say where muddy paths / may lead? Perhaps closer / to a Nirvana not / as expected.” Simone offers a Nirvana we all long for “domiciled / deep within bristling, hollow bones.”
—Laurel S. Peterson, Poet Laureate, Norwalk, CT and author of Do You Expect Your Art to Answer?
Linda Simone’s The River Will Save Us invites her readers, “Come,” then transports them on a series of journeys, to New York City, to Texas, to Japan. She dots her collection with 16 snapshot-like haiku: the moon, an oak, a heron, peonies. But it’s the stories which draw us, reflecting the anxiety, fear, and rootlessness comprising modern American life, combining human and natural landscapes to a complex, aching whole. Simone’s rivers meander, transform, and even kill. But it is within these lilting shifts, these shimmering trails, these deadly floods, that we each must invariably wander our aimless paths to salvation.
—Paul David Adkins, author of Flying Over Baghdad with Sylvia Plath
Oh, how I love every word...such visceral feelings of joy, laughter, love, and sadness. Each poem about Texas brings back memories of my Japanese Tea Garden visits, and also my mother’s stories about the family: their joy at having the garden as their backyard, the lily pond, climbing the rock walls. I am honored that Linda dedicated a poem to the work my grandfather painted for the Tea Garden house, and subsequently the paintings I made, which are dedicated to him.
—Nancy Enkoji, granddaughter of Kimi and Miyoshi Jingu, daughter of Mabel Jingu Enkoji
The poems in Linda Simone’s The River Will Save Us are rich with the wisdom of journeys, the ache of displacement, and the healing power of waters. In “Teahouse of the Texas Moon,” the book’s central section, Simone recounts—and rounds into clarity—the story of Kimi and Miyoshi Jingu, Japanese immigrants who came to San Antonio from California in the early 1900s. Here her haiku speckle-like polished river stones and take on the quality of commentary and grace note.
—Jim LaVilla-Havelin, author of West: Poems of a Place
