Susan Rich: Blue Atlas

I really would like to post 30 times about 30 different poets during National Poetry Month, but — let me admit up front — I’m lowering thresholds all over the place. Soon I’ll be lying inert in the doorway and you’ll have to step over me. But not today! Today, we get a poem from Seattle poet, editor, and teacher Susan Rich.

It’s a book that needs to come with a trigger warning — a young woman, a forced abortion. In the words of Diane Seuss the poems of Blue Atlas (Red Hen Press, 2024), “chart an expansive life which spins around an epicenter of loss,” and transform “anger into amber.”

The long poem “How did I love him — ” with lines like “West African highlife beat,” and “his baritone psalms, his siren pleas” — I just don’t know where to begin. I think of my young adult daughters, and my heart breaks.

But here’s one poem, from the section, “The Decision”:

Your Still Life Builds a Home Inside My Head

In the late afternoon we lose an f-stop
as light bleeds out of the bandaged sky

and like phantom detectives with wide-brimmed hats

we reexamine the compass, the passport,
the magnetized color of four o’clock air.

In this woman-made harbor, we rearrange

pipe stands and glass slides. We multitask wicker stands
where objects could topple at any time —

let them topple! 

Here in the land of deferred decisions,
a hand-painted garden ball reflects on a floating scroll.

In this alchemical mirror, in this ark of a studio —

built on instinct and breath, through windows
clouded and smeared,

under the sign of the light meter

I’ll meet you here. A bright space to hold inside my head,
an open country — another life still new.

— Susan Rich

It’s a book and a life “cracked open” (“Once Mother and Father Were Buried”), and the poems crack open the subject matter — Sylvia Plath and Elizabeth Bishop make appearances, as do images from pop culture, and the world of music. My introduction to Blue Atlas arrived via a Zoom with Olympia Poetry Network (OPN), and hearing Rich’s remarkable, memorable presentation made the book stick in my mind. I had to get my hands on it and read the poems for myself. Given the recent attack on Roe vs. Wade, I kept thinking of that oft-quoted passage from William Carlos Williams:

It is hard to get the news from poetry, yet men [women! people!] die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

These are honest, difficult, and necessary poems. To paraphrase what Rich wrote about June Jordan in a recent Substack Post, These are poems we need right now.

You can learn more about the book at Red Hen Press: https://redhen.org/book/blue-atlas/.

Click THIS LINK to find Rich’s Substack (and information about Poets on the Coast), and here’s a “real” review of Blue Atlas from Tinderbox:

Serhiy Zhadan: How Fire Descends

HOW FIRE DESCENDS: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS, Serhiy Zhadan. Translated by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 2023, 136 pages, paper, $18, yalebooks.yale.edu.

I purchased this book last April, but have put off blogging about it because I would love to attempt to do it justice. A beautiful book, moving poems, by a poet — musician, activist, Ukrainian soldier — I admire so much.

My home life has been challenging of late, a husband’s illness, and so forth, but I read poets such as Zhadan and think, surely I have no excuse not to write. 

So, here, just one poem from the book, and my highest recommendation.

 

“Remember Every Building”

Remember every building and every street, you tell me.

Remember everything that disappears like a traveler descending a hill.

Saying it out loud will drive away the silence and ward off trouble.

Just try to remember this light which pierces the apartments and roofs through and through.

Right now — when there is no turning back from September.

Right now — when we embrace as if we were at the wedding of other people’s children.

Remember these figures in the streets, refined by exhaustion and love.

Remember the ability of birds to come together in the autumn air,

the ability to absorb a person’s fear and warmth, hidden under their shirt,

the joy of recognizing who is on your side by a slight turn of the head.

Despite the wind, remember the breath, the presence, the eruption of language.

As you choose your words: just try to remember this month,

which changes everything, these trees, growing like children, easily growing into maturity.

September 11, 2022

— Serhiy Zhadan

I took a photo of the poem because I am certain the long lines will not translate onto your screen:

In the foreword, Ilya Kaminsky calls Zhadan “the most beloved Ukrainian poet of his generation.” After outlining the poet’s experiences previous to and throughout the current on-going war with Putin’s Russia, Kaminsky adds:

But Zhadan’s writing also manages to transcend his own landscape through his exploration of the dualities and connections between seemingly unlike things. For years he has sought to define the mysterious relationship between war and language. He is a public person who seeks to render visible the most intimate experiences of lovers, knowing all too well that “a language disappears when no one speaks of love.” He is a symbol of his country’s hope and resistance… (p. xii)

I wrote about Zhadan in April of 2023, and you’ll find a bunch of interesting links to follow there.

borrowed from gettyimages

The Lord God Bird

Birdnote.org, etc.

Busy day in our country today, so I’m cheating a bit and just making announcements and reposting from elsewhere.

First, I have been meaning to tell you about two upcoming readings — as it is National Poetry Month, there are many, all over the place —

  1. I’ll be reading at Edmonds Bookshop on Thursday, April 17, 6:30 p.m., with four other poets from David D. Horowitz’s Rose Alley Press; besides David and myself, you can hear Carolyne Wright, Jane Alynn, and Jed Meyers, 10 minutes each. It will be fun.
  2. I am a featured poet at Everett Poetry Night‘s open mike on Monday, April 21. This is scheduled 5-8 p.m., and, yes, I have been there before, but I don’t think it begins at 5:00. More like gathering begins. People grab food and drink and chat. When I tried to pin this down (I can’t be there until 5:30), host Duane Kirby Jensen said, “Show up when you can!” Everett Poetry Night has a page on Facebook, too, but after Nov. 5, I left Facebook so can’t send you there to fact-check me.

I was up early this morning and read a chapbook that I am preparing to review for Escape Into Life (EIL). Rather than try to come up with another book, and a post here, I am reposting the April 4 episode of Bird Note, featuring none other than my dear friend, poet, and Empty Bowl Press editor Holly Hughes.

It is 11 minutes — features 3 of Holly’s poems from Passings (click on this link to see my review of Passings) — and is so so worth it.

Bird Note, April 4, 2025

https://birdnote.org/podcasts/birdnote-daily/poet-holly-j-hughes-honors-birds-weve-lost

At Holly’s website she includes a quote from Jane Hirshfield, “Poetry is the practice of attention.” So is all of life, a lesson that our poems might teach others.

 

Rialto Beach from https://wa100.dnr.wa.gov/olympic-peninsula/rialto-beach

NPM #4: Curve

CURVE, Kate Reavey. Empty Bowl Press, Chimacum, Washington, 2022, 93 pages, $16, www.emptybowl.org.

The curve here is the touch of a hand to a child’s head, the shape of a maple leaf, the sole of a foot against a floor, and it is curve as in the trajectory of a life. A woman remembering her mother’s body as she anticipates the birth of her own child. A woman with small children. A woman whose grown son sleeps upstairs. A brother, surfing a wave. A blue and white bowl. Weaving throughout, the loss of the mother and grandmother. Weaving through all the other poems, the poignant grief and sweetness of making jam on a stove top, as one’s mother once, conjuring memories that curl (and curve) in the room along with the aroma, “the taste of blackberries, the reticence of grace” (“Grief”).

In “Honeycomb,” the surprise of these lines:

Beyond buzz, beyond the onomatopoeia
of desire,
the strum of air
on each iridescent wing—

Many of the poems are long, but, perhaps because insomnia has been haunting my nights of late, I want to share this shorter one. Watch for the curve, and know that this beach near Reavey’s peninsula home will recur later in the book:

After Insomnia

I walk among jellyfish.
Their nimble veins still
and glisten in curves of sand.

This is the time in between tides,
unsettled, and I lean close, squint
into pools of jelly and light—

the glare on the surface of their clear bodies,
drying by and by. Salt winds

tickle and I wake the surest
sign of sleep—a circle of spittle and breath
collecting on my pillow, muses of just-waking

trembling in my limbs.

—Kate Reavey

One of the small pleasures of doing these blog posts comes when I research the poet. If these final links seem tacked on, I hope you’ll click through them and take a look for yourself.

Empty Bowl: https://www.emptybowl.org/

And find a review at Mom Egg Review here: https://merliterary.com/2023/08/23/curve-by-kate-reavey/

Kate is a mover and shaker at bringing poets to Port Angeles / Peninsula College. I just followed her on Instagram, too: https://www.instagram.com/katereavey/