SOURCE: A review of In the Room We Share, in World Literature Today, Vol. 65, No. 1, Winter, 1991, p. 117.

In the following review, Brown offers a positive assessment of In the Room We Share.

Louis Simpson has become one of the most prolific poets on the American scene. Only two years after his substantial Collected Poems (1988) he brings out In the Room We Share, a volume of forty-nine new poems that also includes a prose memoir of his mother in Italy during the summer of 1988. Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and others have included prose pieces in books of verse, so there is ample precedent for such a varied offering.

In a sense Simpson's mother has provided the enveloping action for his life as well as a subject for his poetry. Born in Russia, she made her way to the New World and eventually had a great success in selling cosmetics...