Post by shayepoet on Aug 17, 2008 5:51:21 GMT 2
Lake Erie Blue
Susan Grimm
"In Lake Erie Blue, Susan Grimm has created a vibrant and haunted city of desire
lying along a great lake that ripples with mystery. She sings
of the one place we know more and less about
than any other: home. . . ."
--David Citino
Sample poem:
Things I Can Know
The year my parents met, an earthquake rocked
Cleveland. Calvin Coolidge was President. Liquor
was smuggled across Lake Erie in boats. The average
worker earned $26 a week. Lindbergh had yet
to cross the Atlantic, Trotsky had not yet
been exiled, and the Taisho Dynasty was about to end.
My mother was fourteen, just in from the country.
She shrugs off this encounter. Before they date,
Gandhi will be imprisoned, the stock market will crash,
and Edward VIII will abdicate his throne;
the planet Pluto will be discovered, Donald Duck
will appear in his first movie, and the Cleveland
Bloomer Girls will become national softball champs.
How much did a gardenia cost in 1938? My father
might remember. On Schaaf Road someone pinched
back the plants for weeks to coax my parents'
signature flower, glassed in under Cleveland's
cool skies. They drank Brandy Alexanders
and Pink Ladies; they danced like young trees.
Were breezy Fred and Ginger their models? Bonnie
and Clyde had already been shot dead. Before
they marry, child labor will be outlawed, cave
paintings will be discovered in Lascaux,
and the Seventh World's Poultry Congress
will convene in Cleveland. Germany will invade
Austria, Bohemia, Norway, war spilling over the world
like a kitchen accident hardening out of reach.
In 1945 Roosevelt dies, Hitler shoots himself,
the atomic bomb is dropped on Hiroshima. Bread
is 16 cents a loaf, coffee is 39 cents a pound,
and a man's suit costs $42.50. 11,945
marriages are recorded in Cuyahoga County.
My parents toast with champagne in the backyard
under a sycamore tree. In their photo—framed,
in the bedroom—my mother holds a cascade
of flowers, one for each night of their nuptial
drive to the South. My father still keeps
these honeymoon receipts in the family Bible.
Praise for Lake Erie Blue:
"In Lake Erie Blue, Susan Grimm has created a vibrant and haunted city of desire
lying along a great lake that ripples with mystery. She sings of the one place we
know more and less about than any other: home. These poems, at once satisfying
and disturbing portraits of families and survivors, young immigrants and
citizens of the neighborhood, are reports of the search for human communion
and transcendence, streets illuminated with truth, and a time “When love was
not recognized but given like a sweet scoop of apple on a spoon.”
−David Citino
"Equal parts wildcat and tureen of familial soup, Lake Erie Blue embodies what it
means to know a place deeply, a rare delight in our rootless culture. Familiarity,
for Grimm, breeds not contempt but its ecstatic opposite. Savor her sun-etched
portraits, her landscapes of appetite and sacrament. The book you hold in your
hands will spin you to a world where connection breeds fulfillment."
−Karen Kovacik
Review for Lake Erie Blue:
"Thick with a webbing of family, memory and place, Lake Erie Blue, Susan Grimm’s debut full-length poetry collection, is as much archaeology as poetry; she sifts through layers of what it means to be here, a woman, a lover, a daughter, a sister, raised working-class Catholic on the shore of a mercurial inland sea—and what it means to thrive in all that. There are equal parts reverence and irreverence here, as if Grimm the poet needs to perpetually keep things in balance. But what makes this collection so juicy is that even though she bares her subjects to the bone, something mysterious stays...."
--Amy Bracken Sparks, Angle: A Journal of Arts and Culture
Read complete review "Something Mysterious Stays" at: tinyurl.com/63gqjg
About the author:
Susan Grimm is a native of Cleveland, Ohio. Her poems have appeared in West Branch, Poetry East, Rattapallax, The Journal, and other publications. In 1996, she was awarded an Individual Artists Fellowship from the Ohio Arts Council. Her chapbook, Almost Home, was published by the Cleveland State University Poetry Center in 1997. In 1999, she was named Ohio Poet of the Year by the Ohio Poetry Day Association. Her book of poems, Lake Erie Blue, was published by BkMk Press in 2004. She edited Ordering the Storm: How to Put Together a Book of Poems which was published by Cleveland State University Poetry Center in 2006.
ISBN: 1-886157-46-4, 87 pages, $12.95
BKMK Press, 2004
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BKMK Press: tinyurl.com/6an8dq
Amazon: tinyurl.com/57thq2