The poems in Cartographies travel new territory, exploring the heart’s changeable cartography and the soul’s uneven terrain. They map the familiar, and always complex world of the San Gabriel Mountains, as well as nearby Los Angeles, with its cultural richness and social/political tensions. Divided into four sections—The Soul, The Self, Mountains, The City—Cartographies investigates our profound relationships with time, nature, love, and death.






Simon finds meaning in unexpected locales, from the "Rorschach" on a butterfly’s wings to a barrio bakery, and in the briefest of moments, evoked by the plaintive voice of a spider, or provoked by a breathless escape from an avalanche. These poems record the paradoxes present in our daily lives, those interstices of yearning and mourning or fear and celebration that reveal the deep wells and turbulence of human consciousness. Simon apprehends the elegiac within the purest moments of joy, and intimates catharsis within despair. She opens the mind’s windows to small miracles provoked by the barest glimmers of wonder and hope.