What We Take with Us

by Susan Dworski Nusbaum

Overview

Through the prisms of love and loss, memory, individual narratives, and the natural world, this collection of poems celebrates the bounty of life-ordinary human experience as an act of discovery. Our daily encounters with the world, universal and particular, are what breathe life into us-what we take with us and ultimately leave behind. The poems examine the common landmarks of our lives, "the careful threads that hold us together," joy and suffering, passions and disappointments, the search for identity, complexities of nature, growth and decline, the paradoxes of reality. Meaningful gifts abound in the small and often astonishing details which serve to define the human condition.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781603812337
Publisher:	Coffeetown Press
Publication date:	06/01/2014
Pages:	152
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Born in Rochester, NY, Susan Dworski Nusbaum received her BA from Smith College and her law degree from the University of Buffalo Law School. She lives in Buffalo NY where she has worked as a teacher, arts administrator, and most recently as a criminal prosecutor. She has been a frequent participant in the Chautauqua Institution Writers' Festival and Chautauqua Writers' Center poetry workshops, and has served on the Board of the Chautauqua Literary Arts Friends. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including The Connecticut Review, Poetry East, Nimrod International Journal, Chautauqua Literary Journal, Chautauqua, Harpur Palate, Wisconsin Review, The Sow's Ear, Earth's Daughters, Artvoice, and The Buffalo News. Her manuscript, "What We Take With Us" was a finalist in the 2014 Brittingham/Pollack Prize Competition, University of Wisconsin Press.

Read an Excerpt

Things so tucked away I can't reclaim them,**

folded into the creases of my brain,**not lost but abandoned, useless as desire**for romance, for foolish extravagance,**useless as sweet nostalgia for the**luminous coral roses of Katmandu. --From "The Sadness of Unused Things"

How thrilling the contest we loved as children,**taking in as much as the lungs could hold, gasping**and diving, eardrums pounding, overtaken by clouds**of silverfish swaying with the current, paddling fast**before the air ran out, to surface covered with salt**ready to plunge again into the dark water. --From "The Length of a Breath"

Editorial Reviews

"Nusbaum maps our way home, always unflinchingly aware of those problems never solved… And yet she never forgets the grace of our "glittering strand of flame-bright days," our time spent contemplating the ordinary and extraordinary... These are wonderful poems that demonstrate a love of craft, especially in their command of syntax and the free verse line, and quietly declare a deeply lived, highly self-aware life. Over and over, the poems draw us into the mystery of blessing and destruction that the paradoxically sufficient and insufficient world offers."

--Robert Cording, Walking with Ruskin

"What we take with us, in turns out, is orchestral in its multi-vocal tones and tropes. Nusbaum's voice, in the tradition of Alicia Ostriker and Marge Piercy, is expansive and skillful, preserving her sacred people and places, yet compassionate in its empathic reach into often-ignored others. A voice this large is rare indeed. But what I take most with me in my reading of this extraordinary collection is the way in which it embodies a life that is wholly mature and completely realized or, in the posture of her grandson Matthew's fourth grade photo: 'ready to take it all on.' "

--Philip Terman, The Torah Garden

From the Publisher