Bøker av Michael SIMMs

Windkeep is book 2 in a series about Tessia the Dragon Queen and her loyal advisor and friend Norbert Oldfoot, a gentle mage who has no desire to wield the powerful magics he probably could use if he were not such a good person.

This book is a comprehensive guide for anyone looking to change their negative mindset into a positive one. It's no secret that the power of positive thinking can transform lives, and this e-book is designed to help you do just that.In this e-book, we will cover various topics that will help you change your mindset and transform your life. We will start by discussing how you can motivate yourself financially, and show you how small changes can have a significant impact on your financial wellbeing.Next, we will delve into the art of turning daily problems into positive things. We all face challenges every day, but it's how we deal with them that can make all the difference. In this section, we will provide you with practical tips and strategies to help you stay positive and optimistic, no matter what life throws your way.Finally, we will introduce you to the topic of mental health. It's no secret that mental health is a growing concern for many people, and we want to make sure that you have the tools and resources you need to take care of your own mental wellbeing. We will discuss the importance of self-care, and provide you with practical tips to help you manage stress and anxiety.By the end of this e-book, you will have a new outlook on life, and you will be equipped with the tools and strategies you need to maintain a positive mindset, even in the face of adversity. We hope that you find this e-book helpful and inspiring, and we look forward to hearing about the positive changes you experience as a result of changing your mindset.

Chard deNiord writes, "Michael Simms writes with the courage of a witness and the wisdom of a survivor. These poems leap, lament, pierce, transcend, delve, witness, praise, and testify to the curative power of poetry." Simms's new collection travels through grief, love, social justice, art and nature. The book begins with the poet's return to the Texas evangelical culture of his childhood to attend the funerals of his mother and sister. The poet reveals that he's autistic, a survivor of childhood abuse who didn't speak until he was five years old. The title poem "Strange Meadowlark" riffs on his emergence into language through learning how to listen to jazz. The second section of the book explores love through the beauty of the Texas landscape in poems that capture the happiness of childhood despite the presence of the ghost of the poet's sister -- as in the poem "White Rock Lake." The third section offers poems of social conscience. Racism, war, poverty, violence and America's unacknowledged caste structure are presented through personal narrative. The poems of the third section give witness to racism and police brutality. The final two sections bring together these themes of memory, love, loss and the search for justice in poems that focus on the observation of nature. The long poem "Faye Donnelly explains why the dead are in our lives" is a dialogue with a dying wise woman who explains to the poet how to let go of the ghost of his sister and move on with his life. The final poem "Pupa - a meditation on becoming" is a long poem that attempts to make lyric sense of the cycles of life and death.

Norbert Oldfoot is a simple mage who makes his living traveling the Bekla River Road, selling trade goods, performing healing magic, and singing traditional songs of heroes. He becomes friends with Kerttu, a coppersmith who has developed a new alloy which is perfect for manufacturing swords. When Kerttu is kidnapped by the evil Wizard Ludek, Kerttu's teenage daughter Tessia, a skilled hunter, recruits three friends, including Norbert, and sets out on a quest to find a legendary dragon who lives in the mountains. With the help of the dragon, Tessia plans to save her father. Little do they know that in order to save Kerttu, they will first have to save the kingdom.

The third edition of the Autumn House poetry anthology.

In this richly imagined collection of poems, Michael Simms draws inspiration from history, psychology, biology, and astronomy, yet at heart he is simply a man with stories to tell. A poet returns home from the funeral of his parents to find that the language of grief is inadequate to describe his complicated relationship with his father, so he invents new words to describe his feelings. An autistic boy on a family vacation to Carlsbad Caverns descends deep into the earth, and breathing the darkness, he becomes a bat. A high school performance of Euripides's The Trojan Women becomes a terrifying prediction of what will happen to one of the girls after graduation. A conversation between two old men about Schubert's Death and the Maiden recalls accusations of sexual harassment one of the friends faces. And in a humorous ars poetica, Simms dreams of kidnapping Charles Bukowski and spiriting him to an AA meeting where Buk slings insults, jumps out the window and flies to the nearest bar on black wings, leading Simms to realize that American poetry needs its misfits and outlaws, and in fact, he prefers poems with a little dirt on them. Simms is a poet who writes as easily about the microfauna in a compost bin as about the complexities of love. He explains the hermeneutics of suspicion as adroitly as a visit to a dog park. He describes an old couple at the seashore through the eyes of an artist drawing them and the climate crises from the perspective of a bronze age king watching his city crumble. Gifted, smart, and flawed, frank about his alcoholism and other personal failings, Simms gives us poems that twist and turn and yet always remain clear in their intent. His empathy is all-embracing, and he challenges the reader's expectations by elegantly expressing abstract ideas through wildly creative, wholly original imagery. These poems keep returning to their central concern of how love can endure in a world that is collapsing. In language both musical and vernacular, Michael Simms stretches the limits of poetic autobiography until personal anecdote rises to the level of timeless myth.