The Cartographer's Tongue
AUTHOR
Susan Rich
Questions of geography, ethnic identity, and the corssing of cultural borders keep company with poetic form in this first collection of work.
Reviews
“These poems will wound you and haunt you, but the larger knowing they bring is crucial . Susan Rich is a caring citizen of every heartland.”
—Naomi Shihab Nye
“Susan Rich gives us a collection of poems...generous in the range and power of their emotion.”
—J. M. Coetzee
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.