Dressing the Bear

by Susan L. Leary

Winner of the 2023 Louise Bogan Award, Susan L. Leary's Dressing the Bear is a collection of poems composed in the wake of her brother's passing that explores the themes of love, loss, grief, longing, and addiction. Many of these poems come in the form of a direct address to her brother: how to speak to the dead now? How to convince herself of her brother's continuation in the next life? Of equal concern is the matter of love: what kind of love exists between a brother and a sister, between the addict and those who love him? More than anything, however, these poems seek to unravel her brother's wounds, to understand his pride and shame as a result of addiction, as well as to honor and illuminate his unique wisdom-his charm, his humor, and his creativity-that on even his most difficult days was always there.

Genres: Poetry

94 pages, Paperback

Published July 1, 2024

Reviews

[Teresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful, intimate poetry collection about the death of the poet’s brother at the age of twenty-nine due to substance abuse/addiction. The poems document her inability and even unwillingness to so-call move on from his death, leading to the reality that she is one who is “busy with being alive.”

Because I recently read Leary’s earlier collection, This Girl, Your Disciple, which concerns the decades-old family secret of a suicide, I’m left thinking of inherited trauma…

4.5 -- because... while I know this collection is brilliant, I also know I need a reread to fully appreciate it.

(I finished this on a date—July 23—that I’m noting for personal reasons.)

[Sara Moore Wagner · Rating 5 out of 5]

These poems are gorgeous and take unexpected linguistic turns through the vast landscape of longterm grief. I felt every poem cut straight through. Artful and genuine in all the best ways.

[Kevin Pal · Rating 5 out of 5]

And immediately rereading a second time, taking notes, and hoping to better appreciate the subtleties of this collection. On a first read-through, it's very, very good, and I anticipate it will get better during a revisit.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books of poetry I’ve ever read. I’m convinced this poet has a wisdom beyond human nature.

[Kayla · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rita Dove is quoted, “Bad confessional poetry has always rasied my hackles, because it goes skewering in deep, exclaiming, Ooh, look at all this blood! But I’m like, No one’s interested in your blood. Make me bleed as I’m reading.” And Susan had me right there with her, feeling each of the emotions and grieving for someone I have never met. She doesn’t skim away from the brutality, or the raw parts of grief. The way it shows back up in new ways, but keeps evolving at the same time. But more than anything she shares her brother with us in a way that makes it feel like you know him too. And she doesn’t shy away from the hard, which I feel like is an easy part of grief - we only want to remember the good, or through rosy glasses. But she introduces and lets us learn about him as she remembers, and we get to know him as a full person - not just in his death. Thank you, Susan, for sharing someone who you so deeply love with your readers. She writes with precision on the harrows of loss, being the family member of an addict, and the parts that are often unspoken about death.

[A.M. Hayden · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just finished reading “Dressing the Bear” by Susan L. Leary and it is clear why it won the 2023 Louise Rogan Award. This is a multilayered love letter to her late brother, filled with all the emotions of losing a sibling to addiction, too early, all the complicated feelings, anger, love, forgiveness, remembering moments mundane and utterly sacred. He comes to her in both dreams and daylight, in meditative reflection and after her students leave the classroom.

There are many moments of stillness and truth that remind me of the softness and fierce heart of Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s writing about grieving her son. This kind of special sacredness when poetry works through something most unimaginable, in a way that walks through the multitudes of sadness’ depth, without fully surrendering to a permanent jadedness, what a breathtakingly beautiful (and admirable) accomplishment this is.

My favorite poems from this collection:
A Man does His Apologizing out in the Wilderness
Even Heaven Requires Your Survival
The Professor Asks me to Write a Joyful Poem
Clean
Twisted Threads
Constructive Criticism
Poem Beginning with Two Lines from William Carlos Williams
We’ll Take the Riddle
Not All Kindnesses are Futile
The Birds, They Too, Are Clean

I also greatly admire and appreciate poets who weave sacred in the most “mundane” moments – as Leary does with visiting a mall Build a Bear (being a good big sister – “I’m there to pay for the bear and speak of none of it.”), memory of a conversation “the finest track stars only smoke Newports”; googling “My brother” and seeing where this takes the author geographically and in story, another google (and amusing) reference in the poem, “Mortality, Mathematically Speaking & with a Nod to Flavor Flav” and “Time’s Up, Pencils down” in “Death Notice.”

The masterpiece to me, though, is “When the Belly of a Thing is Cut Open, the World Must Repent of What It’s Ravaged.” My God. This piece is chock full of gems painting a portrait of his personality. “A boy of noble purpose, ready to stop a bullet or free the rubberbanded stems of store-bought tulips” - “As he dug a splinter from my palm once, I trusted him with the sharpness because the sharpness made him tender” – “wound is another word for amenable, for progress, for portal” – the dream imagery comparing his body parts to delightful inanimate objects “teeth as tiny clawfoot tubs; liver a lifeboat for kings; pink loofah that is his spleen” – “what’s left of him weighed out in grams” – “everyone a tiny shipwreck…” I feel like I could read this poem 100 times and still uncover/unpeel discoveries, deep and dark, tough and tender, real and necessary. It is everything poetry aches to be.

She digs into all the unpleasantness, asking where God is, stretching your emotions like a rubber band about to break, but in doing so, makes you love and care for her brother, makes you understand him, as much as another human can, makes his life meaningful to strangers around the world who care about him now too (and what would he think about that, I wonder? I'd like to think he'd be amused...and appreciative).

When I think of this book from now on, I will picture the author carefully and lovingly holding the precious glass box from the "A Man Does his Apologizing..." with the tiny starling wrapped in spider’s silk, turning to feathers, as gnarly and unpleasant and unfigured out as premature death can be, surefooted of the gratitude that comes from being in stillness with grief, and perhaps just as important, sharing it with others.

[Rebecca Olander · Rating 5 out of 5]

Susan Leary’s DRESSING THE BEAR (Trio House Press, 2024) was a book I needed and wanted to take in over time. In these poems, the poet invites us take her hand and accompany her through the wilds of grief, as she takes her brother’s “cold & iron hands, the hands of a king” and lets us look with her into “the frantic lake of his heart.” This intimate, devastating, cleaved-open, and stitched-together book is so brave and stuffed full of love. Thank you for writing this, Susan, and for sharing it. The world, and poetry, is larger with these poems in it.

[Burgi Zenhaeusern · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dressing the Bear is at once elegy and unsparing reckoning with loss and grief, addressed to the author's deceased brother. But, the poems' you fluctuates, moves in then out, is clearly him then seems to become the speaker addressing herself, all in sequences of beautiful soliloquies, which end in:
Afterglow

There is no more burning,
just water
just river
just light.

(The collection's last poem)

[Anatoly Molotkov · Rating 5 out of 5]

"My brother is not a poem/ & this is not a poem in which the history/ is cleared. Often, the afterparty is not much different/ from the funeral." Susan L Leary's exquisite tribute to her brother is both heartbreaking and illuminating as she honors the reality of the dear one who is still very much present in the thoughts of those who knew him.

[Carolyn Hembree · Rating 5 out of 5]

Direct addresses to the deceased brother make this book feel even more intimate. Also accessible with extraordinary images, deft use of narrative mode. Puts me in mind of Marie Howe's magnificent What the Living Do, an elegy for her brother.

[K.C. Bratt-Pfotenhauer · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best collections on grief I've EVER READ.

[Shilo · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I trusted him with the sharpness because the sharpness made him tender, though he believed it made him a man."