Susan Rich

Gallery of Postcards and Maps Susan Rich

"The new and selected poems of Gallery of Postcards and Maps introduce themselves with a warmth that deepens into wisdom. Susan Rich finds music in everything inside and outside her windows: Leonora Carrington, Vegetarian Vampires, lovers and ex-lovers, Lorca and Courbet. This book displays the hallmarks of her oeuvre: her mastery of form; her acuity of heart and eye. These terrific poems are full of compassion, lyricism and attention. The selected reflects an ever-present restlessness of spirit, flesh, and intellect. Glad I got to read it." - Terrance Hayes

"Susan Rich's Gallery of Postcards and Maps: New and Selected Poems is a wondrous and wonderful collection. It gathers poems from her four volumes of poetry while featuring a stellar selection of new work. Perceptive and honest, these masterful poems represent a life's journey full of imagination, desire, and craft, always striving for transcendence--'knowing yes! is the one chosen thing.' This expansive collection is both a work of art and a map for what it means to be an artist." - January Gill O'Neil

"With Susan Rich's new and selected poems, Gallery of Postcards and Maps, we are given a poet's meditative journey through time, history, memory, desire. It is 'a collage of wanting, ' a swirling, hallucinogenic 'quest into the miraculous.' These poems create a deep conversation with artists, works of art, the world itself as art, and, above all, with the wild, living planet itself. At one point, Rich asks--How to write your one blue life? This Gallery of Postcards and Maps serves as a guidebook and a poetic response to that very question. Rich is a lighthouse poet--a poet who returns us to the harbor of the self while also illuminating the wide and mysterious world we live in." - Brian Turner

"In Gallery of Postcards and Maps, Susan Rich distills the themes explored in previous collections--travel, human rights, family history, the color blue. Every idea is a map she chooses to follow and taking her father's advice, confirms for the reader that: journeys don't happen in straight lines." - Geraldine Mills