Cloud Pharmacy

AUTHOR

Susan Rich

Praised by Ilya Kaminsky as a book of lyric fire with rare attentiveness (Amazonaws), this haunting collection explores love, longing, and loss through exuberant imagery—tilt-a-whirls, pineapple rings, small cartons of milk. In a central sequence, Rich explores nineteenth-century photographer Hannah Maynard's proto-surrealistic images, looking in grief-heavy places for revelation (Amazonaws). PEN USA Award winner Susan Rich crafts poems that are at times surreal, leavened with wry black humor, creating what she calls an "ecstatic theology" where ambivalence becomes both song and argument.

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Reviews

"Cloud Pharmacy is a book of lyric fire. In our epoch of quick and shallow literary conversation it is rare to come across such level of attentiveness as one finds in this book."

—Ilya Kaminsky

"In a central sequence, Rich explores nineteenth-century photographer Hannah Maynard's proto-surrealistic images, looking in grief-heavy places for revelation. The result is wonderfully strange and unsettling; this is Rich's most haunting collection yet."

—Kathleen Flenniken

"Rich's gorgeous poems affix moments, both magnificent and minute. And in exquisite and playful poems, a pageant of a life in process develops before our eyes."

—Oliver de la Paz

Susan Rich grew up in Massachusetts where she spent most of her childhood dreaming of other worlds. As soon as she could, she left home and began wandering. Sarajevo, Cape Town, and Gaza City are some of the places her travels took her. THE CARTOGRAPHER'S TONGUE includes a sequence of poems from her time as a Peace Corps Volunteer in West Africa and as an Electoral Supervisor participating in the first national elections in Bosnia. The Cartographer's Tongue won the PEN Award for Poetry as well as the Peace Corps Writers Award. Her second book, CURES INCLUDE TRAVEL, continues with poems of South Africa and Somalia juxtaposed with observations of her home geography of Seattle. Her poems have appeared in the Alaska Quarterly Review, Christian Science Monitor, Harvard Magazine, Poetry International and Witness. She teaches in the Antioch MFA program and at Highline Community College in the Seattle area.