Susan F. Blair

Praise for A Howling: Poems

Blair’s wonderfully sensual poems teem with animals and insects who soothe and torment, whose lives and deaths complement and foreshadow joys and sorrows, as the speaker copes with the decline and loss of loved ones: “can there be any/ ecstasy/ like a cardinal/ in a birdbath/ unaware/ of the cat below,” which precedes the poem bearing news of her sister’s stage four diagnosis. The oneness yields a profound acceptance, as when rotting salmon bodies feed “the future with their pasts,/ bridging life with death/ with life again.”

—April Ossmann, author of Event Boundaries

The poems of Susan Blair envelop the natural world that surrounds her, while remaining rooted in a self-reflection that spans family relationships, aloneness, grief and regrets. Susan’s gift of language, sense of irony, musical word-play and personifications elevate the collection beyond reflection and serve to remind us to embrace the joys of being alive in this world, despite the losses we endure.

—Cynthia Neely, author of Flight Path and Passing Through Blue Earth

Susan Blair’s latest book of poetry, A Howling, is one to stroll through, savor, reflect on and return to. Take it slowly, because though the themes are close-in and unaffected, her imagery and the structure that supports it are complex, her sly switches of perspective a literary curveball. From the rancid taste of chemo to a frog on her fingernail, from prairie thunder to the rasp of a garage door, she decisively captures moments, gently rolls them about and like magic releases whole worlds. Rage, wonder, pain, love and regret are all found here. Some lines are deep cuts, some lines a chuckle, some poems darker than dark, but as a collection they show a brave, full-on engagement with reality.

—Susan Lagsdin, retired professor of English and Creative Writing, journalist for The Good Life

In A Howling, Susan Blair weaves together poems about natural phenomena—squirrels, frogs, deer, mudskippers, assassin bugs—with those about grief, family dysfunction and remorse. These poems have a candid directness, an unabashed and unadorned honesty. The grief poems are enacted with a sure empathy and precision, making them both poignant and moving. The nature poems prove how porous and entwined our interactions with the natural world are. Blair tells her truths with a stark clarity whose aim isn’t self-embellishment, but truthfulness in all its muddy, squishy complexity.

—Joseph Powell, author of The Slow Subtraction: ALS

From the howling coyotes in the opening poem, the poet signals a “goosebump flavor. . . quickening/ my steps toward home.” Invoking over eighty species of fauna—ranging from mudskippers and triggerfish to chukars and civet cats to assassin bugs and the aardwolf—Blair’s close observation and humor are on full display. But this is merely the backdrop to “the bare bone of lonely” when the poet braves the candid reflection of her life in poems like “Hounded”: “I fondle/ my regrets.” It is in these deeply personal poems that Blair’s poetic power and her invocation of the animal world shine—when she homes in on the dark reality of her sister’s illness: “pit viper/ coils/ in your pancreas,/ bites,” how she “stood quailing” as a child in her father’s presence, how familial relationships can be “as toxic as a scorpion.” Conjuring Mary Oliver, we can only howl about Blair: “the soft animal of [her] body” has truly loved and lived.

—Cindy Williams Gutiérrez, author of Inlay with Nacre: The Names of Forgotten Women