Books

Susan Grimm writes poems other poets envy. Her lines are voluptuous yet taut, inventive yet disciplined, packed with music and muscle yet honed to the unflinching insight. From "the creamy fall into love," through "orchards of appletinis" and "the bed's ruts and hollows," to the climb "out of the self at 8000 feet," Grimm charts the trajectory of desire and the ways the self is schooled by love and loss. Ranging from sassy to elegiac, her language stays astonishingly fresh, as do her images, which startle even as they hit their mark. There's more real poetry in Roughed Up by the Sun's Mothering Tongue than in most books quadruple its size.--Lynn Powell, The Zones of Paradise

Susan Grimm's poems know their way around a knife. They'll crack the heels off your favorite pair of red stilettos, pull the blades from your pinwheel, and you'll thank them for it. In fact, you may never feel quite the same inside a poem again, knowing the way Grimm's voice steers you from the kitchen to the grass in the backyard, from striking moments of reverie to images of the present day's natural world. Roughed Up by the Sun's Mothering Tongue teaches us a new sort of glory with its everyday--but never ordinary--moments of splendor and intrigue, havoc and desire. These poems are testaments to the uncommon edges inside all of us.----Mary Biddinger, author of Prairie Fever and Saint Monica

Ordering the Storm empowers readers to see the poetry collection as an artistic medium in itself, and offers diverse perspectives on the subject. Experienced writers and beginners alike will find inspiration and encouragement in the words of exceptional poets such as Maggie Anderson, Wanda Coleman, and Beckian Fritz Goldberg. This book should be required reading for all graduate student poets, even those who are still in the process of writing their first collection, because it includes essential information on poetic sequencing and useful strategies for examining a manuscript's possibilities. One of the most exciting aspects of the book is the sense of community that readers feel upon exploring each essay. Ordering the Storm transforms the task of arranging poems from a solitary undertaking to a collaborative adventure. --Mary Biddinger, Associate Editor of RHINO

In Lake Erie Blue, Susan Grimm has created a vibrant and haunted city of desire lying along a great lake that ripples with mystery. She sings of the one place we know more and less about than any other: home. These poems, at once satisfying and disturbing portraits of families and survivors, young immigrants and citizens of the neighborhood, are reports of the search for human communion and transcendence, streets illuminated with truth, and a time “When love was not recognized but given like a sweet scoop of apple on a spoon.” --David Citino

Equal parts wildcat and tureen of familial soup, Lake Erie Blue embodies what it means to know a place deeply, a rare delight in our rootless culture. Familiarity, for Grimm, breeds not contempt but its ecstatic opposite. Savor her sun-etched portraits, her landscapes of appetite and sacrament. The book you hold in your hands will spin you to a world where connection breeds fulfillment. --Karen Kovacik

Susan Grimm’s poems practice what they preach. “Think interior like a geode,” commands her concluding poem in Lake Erie Blue, and we recognize in that line the crystalline brilliance shining at the heart of each of Grimm’s poems. Her subjects range from an explosive shipwreck in Lake Erie to quiet shipwrecks of desire; from the “inexplicable pink tinge of joy” to the slow, dark days of grief. And the language of Lake Erie Blue is as vast, startling, and unpredictable as the great body of water the book is named for. Grimm’s adventurous music makes each poem, line by line, “all voyage, surprise.” --Lynn Powell, author of Old & New Testaments and The Zones of Paradise

In these accomplished, understated poems Susan Grimm wonderfully achieves two things that would seem mutually exclusive: the vivid and convincing evocation of her family life in its ordinary, working-class setting, and the simultaneous transformation of this material into an exciting aesthetic experience full of surprise and mystery. As Grimm lovingly pulls out past sights, sounds, smells, and feelings like treasures discovered in the attic—“the dangle of skinny legs” as she sits on her mother’s lap, “the loaf of bread like a little house,” her puckery lavender “darkening, from the bottom up,” when she wades into the lake—the small joys and griefs of growing up in a dingy Midwestern industrial town take on a larger meaning. Lake Erie is always on the horizon—seductive, treacherous, shallow, unfathomable. Grimm never tells too much, but she savors every word: one of the pleasures of this volume is the masterly play of her language. It is a book to be enjoyed on the first reading and many times thereafter. --Leonard Trawick, former director, Cleveland State University Poetry Center

"Susan Grimm's Almost Home is a tightly weaved collection in celebration of the doggedness of life. Again and again, these poems offer a hand, insisting on seasons, on fevers, on dentist appointments, on the giddiness after lovemaking, ultimately on "the old names and their desires." With unabashed intimacy, her stunningly lyrical voice directs us away from the darkness, home." --Claudia Rankine