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 skyand 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:
Phipps, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 2023, 136 pages, paper, $18, 
lesson that our poems might teach others.
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”).