Susan Rich - Böcker

Blue Atlas is a lyrical abortion narrative unlike any other. This one-of-a-kind collection follows a Jewish woman and her ghosts as they travel from West Africa to Europe and, finally, to the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco. The speaker searches repeatedly for a new outcome, seeking answers in a myriad of mediums such as an online questionnaire, a freshman composition essay, and a curriculum vitae. The raw, often far from idyllic experience of a global love affair that results in an unplanned pregnancy is examined and meditated upon through a surreal prism. The Blue Atlas, a genus of the common cedar tree first found in the High Atlas of Morocco and known for its beauty and resilience, becomes a metaphor for the hardship and power of a fully engaged life.

Questions of geography, ethnic identity, and the corssing of cultural borders keep company with poetic form in this first collection of work. These poems will wound you and haunt you, but the larger knowing they bring is crucial . Susan Rich is a caring citizen of every heartland.Naomi Shihab Nye Susan Rich gives us a collection of poems...generous in the range and power of their emotion.J. M. Coetzee

This is a dynamic collection by the winner of the PEN West Poetry Award. Rich's poetry tracks the globe, drawing us into the lives of ordinary people on nearly every continent.

"Kaleidoscopic curiosity, powerfully kinesthetic language, and an encompassing compassion range in this abundant collection, in which personal and public realms serve as equal alembics for the distillation of both materia and light."-Jane Hirshfield "Rich is a traveler and an observant one at that, with a keen attention to detail and a wonderful ear. These poems are a delight."-Library Journal

"Cloud Pharmacy is a book of lyric fire. In our epoch of quick and shallow literary conversation it is rare to come across such level of attentiveness as one finds in this book."--Ilya Kaminsky "In a central sequence, Rich explores nineteenth-century photographer Hannah Maynard's proto-surrealistic images, looking in grief-heavy places for revelation. The result is wonderfully strange and unsettling; this is Rich's most haunting collection yet."--Kathleen Flenniken "Rich's gorgeous poems affix moments, both magnificent and minute. And in exquisite and playful poems, a pageant of a life in process develops before our eyes."--Oliver de la Paz Susan Rich is the author of three previous collections of poetry. She lives in Seattle, Washington.