Maurya Simon (Poetry) | San Gabriel Mountains, CA

Maurya Simon taught poetry and literature at the University of California for nearly 30 years. She’s currently a Professor Emerita & Prof. of the Graduate Division there. She has won numerous awards & honors, including a NEA Fellowship in Poetry and an Indo/American Fulbright Fellowship. She lives in the San Gabriel Mts. in southern California.

Books

Chapbooks & Limited Edition Artbooks

• WEAVERS (Blackbird Press, 2002)
• A Brief History of Punctuation (Sutton Hoo Press, 2000)

Press & Reviews

“Feminist, heretical, apocryphal, theological, inspirational, this book is as much about art and the artist’s attempt to render the ineffable as it is about the specificity of the lives of the two saints. Even its take on feminism is heretical. Instead of attempting an alternative construction of the strong female, the book comes at this politics from the position of the male, underpinning the fragility of masculinity, and thus emphasizing so beautifully the strength of women.”
—Chris Abani

In The Golden Labyrinth, Maurya Simon draws on her own experiences while living and traveling in southern India, where she witnessed almost daily the extremities of the human condition — dire poverty and opulent wealth, frenzied materialism and stoic spirituality, excruciating suffering and ecstatic joy. Many of the poems address the continual confrontation with the fluctuations and turmoil in others’ lives so different from Simon’s own, while others attempt to integrate and understand the religious, philosophical, and ethical motives and behavior of the people she met in India. The poems describe the labyrinth of India, a frightening, desperate place for a foreigner to explore, but a place that seems to offer a transcendent good at its core for those who can learn to find it. From a filthy boy spontaneously bursting into song on a street corner to a beggar-woman whose offering of  all she has left (a frail dirge) “defies her terrible hunger”, Simon reminds us again and again of what she learned in India: that “each small world transforms itself.”
—Midwest Book Review

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