What do you think?
Rate this book
Cloud Pharmacy
" Cloud Pharmacy is a book of lyric fire. In our epoch of quick and shallow literary conversation it is rare to come across such level of attentiveness as one finds in this book."—Ilya Kaminsky "In a central sequence, Rich explores nineteenth-century photographer Hannah Maynard's proto-surrealistic images, looking in grief-heavy places for revelation. The result is wonderfully strange and unsettling; this is Rich's most haunting collection yet."—Kathleen Flenniken "Rich's gorgeous poems affix moments, both magnificent and minute. And in exquisite and playful poems, a pageant of a life in process develops before our eyes."—Oliver de la Paz Susan Rich is the author of three previous collections of poetry. She lives in Seattle, Washington.
108 pages, Paperback
First published February 11, 2014
3 people are currently reading
467 people want to read
About the author
Susan Rich
23 books57 followersSusan is the author of five collections of poetry including the most recently released, Gallery of Postcards and Maps: New and Selected Poems. She is also co-editor of The Strangest of Theatres: Poets Writing Across Borders. Her four previous books are Cloud Pharmacy, The Alchemist's Kitchen, finalist for the Foreword Prize, Cures Include Travel and The Cartographer’s Tongue: Poems of the World. She is the winner of the PEN USA Award for Poetry and the Peace Corps Writers Award.
Recent poems appear in The Antioch Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Diode, Southern Review, Harvard Review, and Poetry International. Susan Rich grew up in Boston, Massachusetts but has since become a confirmed Seattlite. When she read in Bosnia and Slovenia the audience burst into laughter at the word "Seattlite" in a poem, mistaking it for satellite. Later, someone explained to Susan that this was funny because Americans come from out of space.
Interview with Elizabeth Glixman at http://www.eclectica.org/v9n4/glixman...
Rich teaches English and Film Studies at Highline College outside Seattle, WA where she is also a co-founder of Poets on the Coast: A Writing Retreat for Women. She has worked in Bosnia, Niger, West Bank and Gaza, and South Africa on behalf of human rights.
Recent poems appear in The Antioch Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Diode, Southern Review, Harvard Review, and Poetry International. Susan Rich grew up in Boston, Massachusetts but has since become a confirmed Seattlite. When she read in Bosnia and Slovenia the audience burst into laughter at the word "Seattlite" in a poem, mistaking it for satellite. Later, someone explained to Susan that this was funny because Americans come from out of space.
Interview with Elizabeth Glixman at http://www.eclectica.org/v9n4/glixman...
Rich teaches English and Film Studies at Highline College outside Seattle, WA where she is also a co-founder of Poets on the Coast: A Writing Retreat for Women. She has worked in Bosnia, Niger, West Bank and Gaza, and South Africa on behalf of human rights.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
June 23, 2020
When it comes to poetry I am always looking for the inward journey and a feeling of being pulled into the work. This collection pulled me inward and brought my soul to my attention once again. It is beautiful and evocative. There are so many poems to which I will return again and again. The first lines of one I will share here:
Endless Forms,Most Beautiful
after a multiple exposure self portrait of Hannah Maynard,c.1894
So she keeps her herringbone hands busy with teacups and white flowers
and murmurs to no one what she will create. No nephew sawed in half
will interest her today, no devoted husband measuring buttes
but a suitcase of her own bright follies. The living room pulses on
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
I am always moved by Susan Rich's work and this is no exception. If you are looking for inspiration, searching your own soul or just beautiful use of language and imagery Cloud Pharmacy is a collection of poems that will not disappoint.
Endless Forms,Most Beautiful
after a multiple exposure self portrait of Hannah Maynard,c.1894
So she keeps her herringbone hands busy with teacups and white flowers
and murmurs to no one what she will create. No nephew sawed in half
will interest her today, no devoted husband measuring buttes
but a suitcase of her own bright follies. The living room pulses on
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
I am always moved by Susan Rich's work and this is no exception. If you are looking for inspiration, searching your own soul or just beautiful use of language and imagery Cloud Pharmacy is a collection of poems that will not disappoint.
April 1, 2014
This is a beautiful book. There's no other way to say it. Susan Rich is a deep, mindful thinker and a lover of language. Put those two things together and you have Cloud Pharmacy. Not only do I love the title, I love what's between the covers. She writes many ekphrastic poems, using art as a vehicle to write her "one blue life." There's a surreal quality here too, which for me is a delight--not your usual fare. As Rich herself says, "here the interior world opens/lightly." But it doesn't stay that way--she attaches herself "line-by-line-/break to this radiant quarrel,/this pocket-sized, revolutionary pen." Once you enter here, you won't put it down. Highly recommended.
April 2, 2014
…don’t let go, let go.
This last line in “The Tangible, Intangible,” one of Susan Rich’s poems inspired by the nineteenth-century photographer Hannah Maynard, captures for me the essence of Cloud Pharmacy, a collection that is intelligent and observant, and which deftly exposes one’s contradictory passions, needs, and even self-regard. Rich addresses several themes in her new book, one of which is grief.
In a section of the book called Dark Room, Rich reflects on the curious and haunting multiple-exposure self-portraits by Maynard, whose daughter died as a teenager. In Rich’s poems, Maynard is a figure that “stands neither in/nor out of the century but floats.” Or, in yet another multiple-exposure, “Hannahs stand here, sit there, bend over…” In another poem, “she overlaps the images and leaves/no line of separation.”
Even in the other poems, the ones on love and fire, there are these opposing perceptions of what is real and what we want to believe. In “There is No Substance That Does Not Carry One Inside of It,” an encroaching fire moves foreigners to politely request action from their Spanish hotelier, who observes the fire, “the little/ flames clearly flirtatious, clearly beyond belief.” Rich creates a sense of the surreal, which pages later she casts off with a straight-on admonition with a letter to the fire, which includes the anxiety-laden question, “Am I wrong even to write?”
In “Conundrum,” the narrator enumerates the dichotomies presented by coupledom, the choices that are available, and the questions that arise only to conclude the inconclusive – that “We are bound/we are cleaving/we are bi.”
The twining in the book of the themes of love, grief and fire, and, within individual poems, the “don’t let go, let go” contradiction create a richly thought-provoking collection of poems.
This last line in “The Tangible, Intangible,” one of Susan Rich’s poems inspired by the nineteenth-century photographer Hannah Maynard, captures for me the essence of Cloud Pharmacy, a collection that is intelligent and observant, and which deftly exposes one’s contradictory passions, needs, and even self-regard. Rich addresses several themes in her new book, one of which is grief.
In a section of the book called Dark Room, Rich reflects on the curious and haunting multiple-exposure self-portraits by Maynard, whose daughter died as a teenager. In Rich’s poems, Maynard is a figure that “stands neither in/nor out of the century but floats.” Or, in yet another multiple-exposure, “Hannahs stand here, sit there, bend over…” In another poem, “she overlaps the images and leaves/no line of separation.”
Even in the other poems, the ones on love and fire, there are these opposing perceptions of what is real and what we want to believe. In “There is No Substance That Does Not Carry One Inside of It,” an encroaching fire moves foreigners to politely request action from their Spanish hotelier, who observes the fire, “the little/ flames clearly flirtatious, clearly beyond belief.” Rich creates a sense of the surreal, which pages later she casts off with a straight-on admonition with a letter to the fire, which includes the anxiety-laden question, “Am I wrong even to write?”
In “Conundrum,” the narrator enumerates the dichotomies presented by coupledom, the choices that are available, and the questions that arise only to conclude the inconclusive – that “We are bound/we are cleaving/we are bi.”
The twining in the book of the themes of love, grief and fire, and, within individual poems, the “don’t let go, let go” contradiction create a richly thought-provoking collection of poems.
April 12, 2014
An enjoyable collection, all in all. I won a copy through a giveaway. I found myself drifting through the front half, but really was drawn to material further in. The sequence focusing on photographer Hannah Maynard was particularly fine. This is work to which I imagine I'll return.
June 19, 2018
This is a beautiful book, each poem like a stream that carries you along its current to an estuary into a larger ocean of language and image, so the collection as a whole opens out and expands. These poems resonated with the elements: fire, earth, air and water.
November 13, 2020
This is one of the most beautiful, nuanced, thoughtful poetry books I've read. Susan Rich is a poet to keep on your shelves, to visit and revisit. HIGHLY recommended.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews