Susanna Childress

Most of the poems in the first part of this book, ""Six Seasons,"" were written according to formal strictures. They use various sorts of rhyme (internal or at a line-stop) and rhythms that match the motion of their subject matter. I've worked with traditional verse: songs, carols, quatrains, lyrics with refrains, and so on. They follow the seasons of the liturgical year from Advent to the green season of Ordinary Time. The second part of the book, ""Leroy James Hopson,"" is written in free verse in order to allow for the development of a narrative with characters and a setting, an atmosphere and a plot. The entire story takes place during the night of November 10, 1974. ""Wangerin wields one of the most unique voices of our time. In his poetry, the eternal and the earthly collide and grapple with one another, and the outworking of that tension is Wangerin's hard-won gift to the reader."" --Pete Peterson, Executive Director, The Rabbit Room Walter Wangerin Jr. has won the National Book Award, the New York Times Best Children's Book of the Year Award, and several Gold Medallion Awards, including best fiction awards for both The Book of God and Paul: A Novel. The author of more than forty books--including The Absolute, Relatively Inaccessible (Cascade Books, 2017)--Wangerin lives in Valparaiso, Indiana, where he is Senior Research Professor at Valparaiso University.

Most of the poems in the first part of this book, ""Six Seasons,"" were written according to formal strictures. They use various sorts of rhyme (internal or at a line-stop) and rhythms that match the motion of their subject matter. I've worked with traditional verse: songs, carols, quatrains, lyrics with refrains, and so on. They follow the seasons of the liturgical year from Advent to the green season of Ordinary Time. The second part of the book, ""Leroy James Hopson,"" is written in free verse in order to allow for the development of a narrative with characters and a setting, an atmosphere and a plot. The entire story takes place during the night of November 10, 1974. ""Wangerin wields one of the most unique voices of our time. In his poetry, the eternal and the earthly collide and grapple with one another, and the outworking of that tension is Wangerin's hard-won gift to the reader."" --Pete Peterson, Executive Director, The Rabbit Room Walter Wangerin Jr. has won the National Book Award, the New York Times Best Children's Book of the Year Award, and several Gold Medallion Awards, including best fiction awards for both The Book of God and Paul: A Novel. The author of more than forty books--including The Absolute, Relatively Inaccessible (Cascade Books, 2017)--Wangerin lives in Valparaiso, Indiana, where he is Senior Research Professor at Valparaiso University.

Poetry. "Readers familiar with Susanna Childress's Jagged with Love will recognize her distinctive voice in these poems: her nerve, her honest, quirky, irreverent, immediate and embodied yearning that rushes, wordy, right up to the ragged margins! In this second collection, new formal approaches bring breath and space to the lines, even delicacy sometimes, but these fine poems move with no less urgency because they are compelled by her signature quest for truthfulness. This search refuses perfectionism and mere aestheticism, yet admits beauty en route, as Childress claims, There needs to be no right word / There needs to be a wide hole / a whole mouth / where the right word / isn't" Julia Spicher Kasdorf."

Susanna Childress writes with an earnest desire to understand things physical and things spiritual. What results is a first collection of provocative, honest poetry that explores various human predicaments: a cancer-ridden wife, an explosive father, an infertile couple, various sexual aggressors, a missing girl. Such careful portraiture provokes the reader to consider the complexity of human love: how selfishness, fear, lust, and even brutality might coincide with tenderness and loyalty. Childress's writing is refreshingly naive and clear, her voice essentially inquisitive. She is brave enough to look at the darkness of the world, but she is more courageous to hope.