Praise For Study of the Raft
“I can’t remember a debut collection so startling and fresh, so uncompromising and passionate. Leonora Simonovis’s powerful, confident voice runs through each and every one of these poems like a lifeline in defiance of injustice and oppression. She writes about Venezuela, exile, and family with such rich detail and nuance that we are swept away into her struggle to maintain a precarious balance in all of her worlds. This book is a sharp reminder that the personal is also—and always—political. She is always tuned in to the heart, a heart we can believe in and trust.”
—Jim Daniels
“In Leonora Simonovis's beautiful book, Study of the Raft, family history is mixed with feminist history, and what it means to be a citizen. The death of Abuela's child intersects with what it means to be a woman, dodging "the bullets of others' desire," and the speaker's sense of alienation in her own country. All of these tensions accumulate into an important geometry of American life. Simonovis's poems are plainspoken and powerful, gentle and fierce. An impressive debut, these poems are a gift to contemporary American poetry.”
—Victoria Chang
Read a review by Rebecca Valley at Drizzle Review
Read a review by Lisbeth Coiman at the New York Journal of Books