In three compositional movements, these poems undertake a journey through geographies of human history into the intimacies of childhood, aging, and memory. Placement reflects on the disparate conditions of biography, place, and relationship that shape our lives. Not the End of the World affirms the inevitability of uncertainty, loss, and grief. Medicinal Properties arrives into gratitude for the solace of love, for the peace in solitude, and always for the power of beauty. The poet encounters the nature of all experience-the physical universe, the living world, thought and feeling-as impermanence and change. As Movement.
With deep sensibility and delicate wit, Suzanne Maxson’s lyrical and honest poems consider both the personal-grief, aging, and the medicinal properties of travel and art-as well as our own place in the world’s sorrows.
Carol Ciavonne, editor of Posit, author of Azimuth and Birdhouse Dialogues
In this stunning collection, the poet makes space for us to contemplate a natural world that is bound for catastrophe and yet filled with breathtaking beauty.
Elizabeth Murphy, editor of Grid Books
Reading these poems, you are bound to see the night sky and the stars more precious and more clearly than you had before.
Elizabeth Herron, Sonoma County Poet Laureate, author of In the Cities of Sleep and Insistent Grace
Suzanne Maxson invites us to consider loss and the mind-stopping joys of art and connection through poems that are fresh and true. Reading them, I felt recognition and expansion, as I would after a nourishing conversation with a wise friend.
Valerie Brewster Caldwell, art director and book designer
Here is poetry that springs, that leaps like Merce Cunningham, like the mind of Helen Keller.
Lee Rossi, author of Wheelchair Samurai and Darwin’s Garden
Suzanne Maxson has an ear for the musical in language and an eye for its placement on the page.
Pat Nolan, publisher, Nualláin House; poet and translator
Suzanne Maxson
was raised in suburban Southern California (with a fortunate interlude in Iran) and migrated north in 1972 to the Russian River watershed of Sonoma County. As a public high school teacher she integrated the arts and literature with history, social justice, and comparative religion. As a writer she was compelled always to poetry. Movement is the first collection of her work.