Books
Frank Simmonds’ ascent — from addiction, incarceration, and refuse thrown into an urban dumpster, to a life of luminous love— is a parable for our age. Rita Simmonds recounts the miracle story of the husband she met in the midst of their life’s path and holds back no detail. Her riveting account of Frank’s ascent defies our current state of belief. Yet who can refute the truth of a life? Sown into the heart of this homeless derelict, while abandoned on the streets of New York, were the mysterious seeds that transformed his soul and the community of all those around him. Readers who contemplate those seeds in Frank’s iconic life will find their hope and faith renewed. ~Lawrence Sullivan, Emeritus Professor of Theology, University of Notre Dame, & former Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard
In Rita’s poems, the human heart is disturbed, surprised, changed, and revived, and Mercy accomplishes it all. ~Lisa Lickona, Editor of Saints, MAGNIFICAT
Following in the footsteps of her poetic forbears Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, and Allen Ginsberg, Rita Simmonds has discovered the soul of her city and blesses her readers with her vision. –Angela Alaimo O’Donnell
Rita A. Simmonds offers unique, penetrating poetic reflections on the traditional Fourteen Stations of the Cross along with award-winning Lenten poems.
Reverent yet reinvigorating, delightful yet profound, personal yet universal, these poems draw us anew into our own relation to the Infant Birth, to the Star we seek to follow, to holiday traditions, even to the trees that we adorn at Christmas yet have a life of their own year round. –Peggy Rosenthal
Those who create … long for the eternal.
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Rita A. Simmonds 