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Undertow
"With Undertow, Susan Austin sets herself adrift on the current of her experience. Her poems capture moments of delight and sorrow with equal honesty, and her incisive language peels away the veneer of routine and expectation to reveal some astonishing truths. Austin is a masterful poetic conjurer, concealing profound emotional insights in the patterns of everyday living. She has perfected the art of drawing the simplest words into the service of her compelling revelations, and her book is an impressive debut achievement."
- Cameron Hindrum
"Susan Austin's poems penetrate to the core of the human condition: the dysfunctional, the erotic, the often unnoticed magic of the everyday. Her perceptions are acute and originally presented, but what really stands out is the compassion which informs her celebration of the variousness of this world."
- Tim Thorne
- Cameron Hindrum
"Susan Austin's poems penetrate to the core of the human condition: the dysfunctional, the erotic, the often unnoticed magic of the everyday. Her perceptions are acute and originally presented, but what really stands out is the compassion which informs her celebration of the variousness of this world."
- Tim Thorne
54 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2012
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 3, 2013
I feel mildly trepidatious attempting to review a book of poetry. The whole point of poetry, it seems to me, is to communicate something prose cannot. I tend to read books for their ideas, which extend or alter my own. Writing reviews, like discussing the books, allows me to engage in conversation with those ideas, incorporating my response to them, into a worldview. In my reading, as in all things, I like to argue.
Poetry is something different though. Poetry touches me, it either resonates or doesn't, good poetry has this perfection of transmission I can't touch. It can evoke things that are familiar or introduce me to a way of being that is entirely foreign. I can say whether it touched me or not, but probably never why.
I've known Susan Austin and a few samples of her work for more than a decade, and I was thrilled to see she'd finally published and a little curious to see how much I would like it. Like any volume of poetry, its a mixed bag, with a couple that didn't quite seem to work to me, but many of which really did. The strength is, to my eye, in capturing those moments of intense emotion that occur in the everyday; intensity of flirtation, the struggle to cope with lives more difficult than they look, the sense of loss in changing relationships.
I liked it a lot.
Poetry is something different though. Poetry touches me, it either resonates or doesn't, good poetry has this perfection of transmission I can't touch. It can evoke things that are familiar or introduce me to a way of being that is entirely foreign. I can say whether it touched me or not, but probably never why.
I've known Susan Austin and a few samples of her work for more than a decade, and I was thrilled to see she'd finally published and a little curious to see how much I would like it. Like any volume of poetry, its a mixed bag, with a couple that didn't quite seem to work to me, but many of which really did. The strength is, to my eye, in capturing those moments of intense emotion that occur in the everyday; intensity of flirtation, the struggle to cope with lives more difficult than they look, the sense of loss in changing relationships.
I liked it a lot.
August 23, 2013
This author deserves everyone of five stars!
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews