Launch date:
Saturday, November 30th, Salt Spring Island Public Library 7pm
Berberitzen
Susan Alexander
Susan Alexander’s Berberitzen is a masterful braiding of language and image that leaves a bodily impact; these pages are filled with a scent and taste of desire. Poems to her beloved, “He filled the horizon/ when he wasn’t there” trace “the night’s hard slap” as diagnosis becomes reality. One can only hope that this holy love story will fill her days and nights as “Pollen on salal/ each leaf vein etched/ with gold dust…” Highly Recommended
—Terry Ann Carter, author of Tokaido (Red Moon Press, 2017) winner of the Touchstone Distinguished Book Award
Susan Alexander’s Berberitzen is the story in poems about love discovered late in life—both its tenderness and its tenuousness. Beginnings and endings are woven together in this brief and artistically-beautiful chapbook. “You were leaving the world when I found you,” writes Alexander, seeing partings as rehearsals and changing seasons as seasons of love. The ordinary takes on new meaning or no meaning as a familiar fir becomes a towering seraphim and daily irritations fall away. Reading these poems, I felt both heartbroken and full-hearted, love and loss utterly inseparable in the telling.
—Laura Apol, Lansing Michigan poet laureate emerita, author of Cauterized (Michigan State University Press, 2024)
Susan Alexander is the author of two collections of poems, Nothing You Can Carry and The Dance Floor Tilts, Thistledown Press. Her poems have won awards and appeared most recently in The Southern Review as well as anthologies and literary magazines in Canada, the U.K. and the U.S. Susan has hosted poetry readings and panels for the Federation of BC Writers and Victoria’s Festival of Writers.
She lives on Nexwlélexm/Bowen Island, the traditional and unceded territory of the Squamish people.
ISBN: 978-1-7781603-6-3 | $20
Available at independent bookstores in your community, and by direct order through Raven Chapbooks: click here
