In her ravishing collection Over the Village, Susan E. Gunter conjures a tangled, bereaved past in poems as vivid as still-wet canvases, dripping and alive with color. The world she creates in these pages is a world laden with loss but also rich with small joys, a world of forgiveness but also of a rage that glows hot beneath the cool façade of the everyday. From cover to cover, this book is a testament to the power of poetry and painting to help us to bear even a difficult history, even a history as unwieldy as an over-grown child slung, wailing, on one hip.
-Francesca Bell, translation editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books, former poetry editor
at River Styx, author of Bright Stain and A Love that Hovers Like a Bedeviling Mosquito.
"Once I was young. I lost someone," writes Susan Gunter in her poetry collection Over the Village. Such clarity is sewn with deep images of childhood, including a "rat's nest" of disturbed relatives, bitter rutabaga, and sour, unripe blackberries. These poems trace the "dividing line" that "sunders before from after" with a delicacy that permits darkness to shine.
-Natasha Sajé, author of award winning memoir Terroir and three poetry collections, one
of them the double award winning Red Under the Skin. She is poet in residence at Westminster
College and a member of the poetry faculty at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.
In this book, Susan Gunter's richly realized experience with literature and a fully-lived and engaged life are the inspiration for poems that are elegant, moving and virtuosic, such as the lovely, haunting "Ester's Sestina," harnessing an obsessively repetitive form to express the way we sometimes return to a deep childhood wound, nursing it like a sore tooth and never quite able to access the pain's source. These and other poems will engage and delight your brain at the same time they feed your heart and spirit.
-Rebecca Foust, author of Paradise Drive (Press 53 2015) and ONLY, forthcoming from
Four Way Books in 2022.
