Mare’ Simonet features January 22

Mare’ Simonet is a poet and multi-media artist, living in Berkeley, CA. Her series of essays, Confessions of a Dopamine Addict,  as well as her first poetry book, The Poet Next Door, are due to be released in early 2018.  Both works include many humorous references that reveal aspects of life with Parkinson’ s Disease.

While Ms. Simonet has said she dislikes being labeled as a disabled artist, living with Parkinson’s Disease has influenced her choices of

subject matter and the desire to create a mythology with a  message .

Mare’ has said that poetry is  “ without linear parameters .. One can disregard, recreate, bend, flex, or falsify time in a poem.”

After she presented a poem written two days after her husband passed away, a recent reviewer had this to say :

… I heard the writings of a friend (of his) who had lost a loved one recently, and her words, like a gale, swept powerfully through the room but exited gently and with such raw elegance that it left me wishing I knew how to write.

During the program, Mare’ will read excerpts from her essays and book, as well as new works dedicated to her late husband .

Untitled

my mind is inoperably bound to memory 

I try to hold on when the ascent is threatened

try to stay calm, find a portable bridge

to negotiate that rotten crevasse

filled with the carcasses of lost phrases,

today's to-do list, yesterday's memos

sometimes the tightly wrapped package

becomes unbound

the flow of remembered occurrences 

stretched out in one long straight line

coyly teasing the telomeres, trying to outrace them