It’s a tradition that began last year, and I hope we repeat every year: making sure we properly acknowledge National Poetry Month by celebrating the work of an amazing contemporary poet! Just like last year (check out our conversation here), I had the extraordinary pleasure of chatting with Susan Rich, show remarkable new collection Blue Atlas is now available. (As always, we are proud to support independent booksellers, and encourage you to pick up your copies via our friends at The Potter’s House.)
I encourage you to enjoy the recorded conversation, below, but a few words of praise, which I’m at once obliged and honored to share.
Throughout the collection we see both the power and purpose of metaphor: the necessity of it, especially for locating or discussing things that otherwise often die in silence. It’s immediately evident we are in the capable hands (and mind, and heart) of an expert, and works like Blue Atlas –aside from the aesthetic joys they induce– serve to increase awareness; no one can read these poems and come away from the experience unchanged. Work this frank and affecting is an empathy generator: I am convinced stories being told equip others to speak — and move the needle, however gradually, in a necessary direction: toward truth, away from silence.
This, to be certain, is deeply personal work, but it also manages what rare art achieves: it fuses the personal and political, with words (and metaphors!!) that render the expression universal in the best sense; these are poems only this poet could write; they are poems everyone can (and should) read. As I prepared for our discussion last night I happened to see the breaking news out of Arizona, and it was a very unnecessary, but unavoidable reminder that work like Susan’s could hardly be more timely, relevant, essential. Please read and share this book.
ABOUT THE BOOK
The remarkable poems of Blue Atlas chart an expansive life which spins around an epicenter of loss, but loss is too tame a word, really, for what this speaker bears. “I am a woman swollen with the history of my dead,” Rich writes, “a body awash in stories.” She describes an imperiled childhood and a young adulthood that culminates in a coerced midterm abortion, which “stays suspended in resin / like a tiny scorpion, / transforming anger into amber.” Blue Atlas exquisitely performs the way trauma—the utter loss of self-determination, of choice—can turn a life to seawater, to drift, to “somehow, the might still be—” mapping “constellations of in-between,” suspended between deciding and undeciding, from a space outside of the circumference of longing, where poetry lives.
—Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Susan Rich is the author of six books of poetry including Blue Atlas, Gallery of Postcards and Maps: New and Selected Poems, Cloud Pharmacy shortlisted for the Julie Suk Award, The Alchemist’s Kitchen, and others. Her poems have appeared in myriad outlets, including the Academy of American Poets: Poem-a-Day, Alaska Quarterly Review, Bennington Review, Gettysburg Review, Harvard Review, and O Magazine. Her work has been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net Awards. Her writing has received fellowships from Artists Trust, Seattle/King County, 4Culture, the Fulbright Foundation, and Peace Corps Writers. You can explore her writing at poetsusanrich.com
