The poems in Susan Suntree's This Time This Place are offered as contemplations of our current moment. Inspired by the work of Basho and Tu Fu, all are intended to awaken what is wild, communal, and generous.
About the Author :
Susan Suntree is an award-winning poet, essayist, and community activist. Her work is published in journals and anthologies, and includes essays and book chapters about feminist and environmental theatre. Books of poetry include Dear Traveler (Finishing Line Press) and the non-fiction epic poem Sacred Sites: The Secret History of Southern California (University of Nebraska Press), written with the guidance of award-winning Western scientists and indigenous Southern California Culture Bearers, and released in a recently updated paperback edition and audiobook. A Los Angeles Times bestseller, awards include the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association Award for Nonfiction, PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Narrative Poetry, the Mellon Foundation's Elemental Arts Award; the audiobook was a finalist for a Society of Voice Arts and Sciences prize. Other books include Eye of the Womb (Power Press, poetry), also published in Madrid as a bilingual edition, El Ojo de la Matriz (Vision Libros); Tulips (Exiled-in-America Press, poetry), a bilingual chapbook of translations of poetry by Spanish poet Ana Rossetti; Rita Moreno (Chelsea Press) YA biography; Wisdom of the East; Stories of Compassion, Inspiration and Love (Contemporary Books) with a foreword by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. www.susansuntree.com
Review :
"Poetry has always been a way for us humans to locate where we are. Not by the macro dimensions of a geography, but by what the poet's attention is drawn to. Haiku's sudden insight relies on that same attention. Here, then, instead of the mountain range in the distance being our compass, it is the intimacy of a moment's perception. Suntree's work here follows in the tradition of William Carlos Williams's iconic, 'So much depends / upon . . . .' It fosters and furthers the human power of awakening to beauty in all of its manifestations."
-Julia Connor, Sacramento Poet Laureate Emeritus, author of Corresponding Flowers, The Delta Poem, and Canto for the Birds
"Susan Suntree's This Time This Place gets it exactly right. Suntree knows this moment's anxieties-how 'sirens whirl red red red red, ' how ash 'shrouds' our lungs, how we stand uncertainly 'at the verge of a slow flowing continent.' But hers is not an apocalyptic vision: here too, 'comfrey's long green leaves' thrive 'beside the boulevard's / din and growl' and, in the midst of pandemic, a maple's boughs arc high, 'errant with buds.' She is drawn to beauty that others might cast aside: old clothes that 'once waved over miseries and sad decisions' become fresh rags, 'faultless, clean, folded.' Eyebrows thinned by age become, with pencil and liner, 'Arcs de Triomphe.' Like the Tang poets she admires, Suntree renders her intensely observed lines with both expressive restraint and sudden moral clarity. 'I feel my way deeper into darkness and wait, ' she writes. The wait is worth it: despite everything, on the other side we find life and its grace."
-Tom Laichas, author of Landscapes from an American Afterlife and Three Hundred Streets of Venice California
