Little Prayers

by Susie Meserve

While a poem is traditionally an artifact, these poems make you feel like you are the artifact, having been crafted by them, as if they have always existed. And yet despite that peculiar species of infinity, a Susie Meserve poem is always happening this morning, some Wednesday, March, the solstice, and the speaker navigates a (refreshingly) tangible topography of a ballpark, a still lake, a New England glacial valley, the Dakotas, 42,000 feet above a shoebox, Taipei, Pompeii, Mars. Mars was a god, and as with Mars, we have both reached and failed to reach God, and the poet knows this (here, in this book) better than I could ever describe. She is simultaneously a visionary masked as a suburban shopper sifting through apples and the apples themselves, undulating across a mysterious swell of days, nights, days -- both praying to and resisting some luminous, apple-y god. There exists in this book a marvelous interplay between a boundless knowing and a boundless unknowing -- Susie Meserve is no doubt herself an "Every time I open my mouth, something hops in," she sings. I have already hopped in, I am hopping in, and I am about to hop in. Join me. Susie Meserve grew up outside of Boston and was educated at Tufts University and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Her poems have appeared in Indiana Review, Cimarron Review, Bateau, Gulf Coast , and others. She is also the author of the chapbook Faith (Finishing Line Press). She lives in Berkeley, California, with her husband and two young sons.

72 pages, Paperback

Published January 18, 2018

About the author

Susie Meserve is a poet, essayist, blogger, and mother. Her debut poetry collection, Little Prayers, won the 2018 Blue Light Book Award from San Francisco–based publisher Blue Light Press. Her personal essays have appeared in the New York Times, Elle, Salon.com, and the book anthology Show Me All Your Scars: True Stories of Living with Mental Illness. Susie lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and two young sons.

Reviews

[Grainne Daly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Little Prayers is a masterfully crafted collection that implores the reader to stay for a while. Time weaves itself through the poems, from the ripening fruit to the passing of months, yet there is a sense that with the passing of time we accept all that is cyclical in the world. Susie Meserve's poetry celebrates time and space that spans from the Pharaohs to a passenger flying at 42,000 feet, from San Francisco to the moon. Meserve plays with a range of forms throughout Little Prayers and the result is a dynamic mix of beautifully rich poems that deal with love and loss, with family and beauty. In some places, there were echoes of Sylvia Plath, not least when 'balloons' appeared in 'Diary', and throughout there was a distinct sense that you are in the hands of a master poet. As debut collections come, this is of an impeccably high standard. Whenever I return to read it, it never fails to captivate me.

[Jess Witkins]

I received a copy from the author and had the pleasure of interviewing her on my blog.
We talked about the fluidity of poem styles and why poetry matters today.
Check it out, leave a comment, hang with the author and I!
https://jesswitkins.wordpress.com/201...

[Katie]

My friend Susie writes beautiful poems.

[Adrienne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Meserve's poems deliver meditations on living, loving, leaving, returning - covering such a vast range of human experience in an economy of words. From the first poem, "A Bird, A God," her choice of words is compelling and original: "Is that how you knew, by looking into the mouths of trees?" Each piece reads like a relatable story, in voices as familiar as an old friend whose testimony is trustworthy, knowledgeable, reassuring and sparking of memory. I planned to read one or two a day as I made my way through this compelling book, but it was impossible not to take it all in in one reading, and then read again and again.