I’m Back in Action. With a New Poetry Book.

by Susie Meserve | Feb 13, 2018 | Great Reads, Writing

Friends!

Well, I’m over the moon. Sometime last October, I disconnected the JetPack plugin from my WordPress site, trying to figure out why my site was loading so slowly. Then all hell broke loose?when I reconnected the plugin, no one could see my blog posts. No emails went out. Radio silence. I’ve been emailing the JetPack people every week for four months, feeling totally frustrated, and saying a thousand little prayers that I’d be able to communicate with my readers again. I wrote this blog post, about activism, which maybe none of you saw, and then I gave up. So then today some dude named Jeremy casually emailed to say he’d poked around a bit, updated a few things, and wham?my “Test” post (which you can obviously ignore) went out successfully.

I’m back in action.

And I have so much to say: it’s already spring in California, which is both lovely and deeply unsettling. I’m having a creative explosion in my forties, apparently, because I’ve been playing music (live! Out! In bars!) and writing and feeling good. The Olympics are rocking my world (my husband and I love to watch the snowboarding while inserting our own commentary, full of pot jokes). And, best of all, I have a book out, my first full-length poetry collection. It’s called Little Prayers, and it was published last month by the wonderful San Francisco?based publisher Blue Light Press.

This book was a long time in coming, testimony to the fact that writers sometimes suffer through multiple rejections, and even a 15-year hiatus, before a thing gets published. Here’s a teaser:

A BIRD, A GOD

I?ve been holding something

in my hard fat belly for days

and in the night I wake from dark dreams.

But no one, nothing, is there.

A bird, a God, what was it you saw last?

Was it this?

I?ve forgotten how to read, what language

to pluck from the ears of strangers.

I salute the sun facing a dead blue wall.

I look into the earth.

Were you a tree cutter? Is that how you knew,

by looking into the mouths of trees?

? Susie Meserve, 2018

Local friends, I’d love to see you at my March 10 book launch at Octopus Literary Salon in Oakland, where I’ll be reading with the talented Kate Folk. I’ll also read at the San Francisco Writers Conference this Friday night at the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco (free and open to the public! Lots of great poets). And stay tuned for more readings and events this spring and summer.

Warmly, warmly, warmly,

Susie