Customer Reviews:

• "Linda Simone's poetry has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. In this chapbook she shares her world and moments of her life with humor, clarity, and poignance. Her poems are equally pleasing whether read silently or aloud.

In "Day Laborers," the poet looks out her window and records what she sees so clearly that every reader can share in the vision. I quote one excerpt:
      They tear down and they build up.
      Three men,
      with rhythmic revolutions
      of sledgehammers, smash
      the shifted wall to rubble –
      the wall that no longer retains.

"Plum" is sensual and humorous as Ms. Simone shares her delight with readers:
      Even the word tastes
      firm and cool,
      makes you open to bite
      a chunk that rests
      luscious on your tongue…

Ms. Simone excels at creating striking metaphors. I read and reread "Black Birds," where birds become "…black clots in leafless arteries and veins." And in "Log," a sentimental favorite, a fallen tree takes on human spirit:
      She leans, diagonal, a gray lady
      nearly fallen. Around her neck,
      a choker of putty funghi.
      Wrinkled skin peels like old wallpaper
      and weedy hair hangs
      disheveled. Underfoot,
      slugs and black armored bugs
      fester. No one watches
      or cares as she rots
      back to black earth.

"Toss-aways" addresses the mundane in life and does this in ways so beautiful we rethink what may be trash or treasure. I quote one verse in excerpt:
      The detritus of our lives
      could fill five museums: all the balled
      tissues that blotted tears of despair,
      the perfectly good friendships abandoned,
      the times we used to sleep late
      or consciously breathe in air –
      when air was fresh.

The everyday visions and thoughts in Cow Tippers are memorable because Linda Simone writes poetry everyone can understand and appreciate. Words and sounds are skillfully combined for maximum impact as she recreates the world around her. This chapbook is highly recommended." - Laurel Johnson, Midwest Book Review

• "I’m sitting in the morning sun drinking tea and reading the book again. I like the music in these poems. It's very strong and comes up off the page, even in a quiet reading, easily. Against that, I like the clarity of your eye on the everyday and your ideas about what you're seeing.

So for example, Laundromat...the weight and rhythms of that place, the people, and the wet load of the place are so beautifully brought to us; the hard plastic that really can't be made comfortable and the poet having to sit there at this moment in her life.

In Root Canal that last verse just kills me: “all bloat and rot” oh so wonderful, sludging clinging.

I think I may like your viscera best--it's very strong, very linguistically and image- and sound-driven in the strongest intertangle. You do that so well. I love feeling all those things at once in those lines.

Plum... “Even the word tastes cool” -- that's a perfect example of what I mean. It's as if you make the whole line into some idea-driven onomatopoeia.

The opening to Black Birds again has such a palpable bringing us into this moment, this poem.

I like your work very much. It's a wonderful thing that you have brought out into the world. I can feel your own deep pleasure in it. And how central it is to you. It's the beat at the center of your life. I can see that you set yourself a kind of challenge to bring your eye to us. You are so carefully, so utterly engaged in that which surrounds us, too often without notice, that you're noticing for us.

I'm so glad you did this. And I'm so glad I got to have a copy of this fine work. It's been a pleasure to have your work to wake up to; I'm leaving the book on my morning reading pile so that I can pick it up again and read them again." - Joanna Clapps Herman

• "Having just returned from 2+hours at the dentist for a root canal job, I picked up the mail. I opened your volume, started to put it on the side for future run-through. Scanned the list of poems and up popped Root Canal. So I read them all. My favorites: Working Papers (ingenious; took me a few minutes to catch on); Plum (only I would say Plum-m-m-m); Milk Box (didn't think you were old enough to remember those days); Wind (imaginative; lovely ode to your love); Poetry Daily brought a smile to my face. Can't tell you how many times in my writing days (limited now) I awakened to make some notes on the nighttable pad. My problem on awakening next day was not being able to read what I penned! And I was glad to read Cow Tippers, after struggling with that title - had not a clue. THANK YOU. Oh yes, I did find one rhyme (vain and sane). Keep going." - David Shair

• "Cow Tippers is a chapbook of nineteen poems, only one of which is about cows. Simone’s poems are, however, full of everyday items, people, and places, shown to us in a simple, lyrical way. The first poem in the book “Day Laborers” is one of the best, as the speaker ponders her inability to get a poem finished, as she watches workers outside:

        In six hours, they’ve torn down
        and built up a wall to live for decades.

I think of William Carlos Williams with Simone’s poem “Plum” and of Billy Collins’ humor with “Poetry Daily,” wherein the speaker is sent

        searching
        under the bed
        for the poem that got away.

The sort of advice in “Swinging” reminds me of Frost:

        Swing as long as
        you can pump legs.
        Bend knees to back up
        then set them stick straight
        to charge forward.
        Or sail on
        with the press of someone
        standing just behind
        unseen, pushing,
        grounded.

These poems are spare, imagery-laden, full of questions. There are no earth-shattering truths or epiphanies registered in them, but I appreciate them for their tightness and conversational though poetic style. The title poem seems out of place in this collection because the rest of the poems feel like cityscapes. And I wonder why Simone chose this one for her title, as it is one of the weaker poems in the book. Overall, I enjoyed reading the poems, and I would be interested in reading more of Simone’s work." - Review written by Shaun Perkins, posted on WomenWriters.net