Tracing the Lines

What an astonishing book. Do not miss this. So much calls out to Susanna Lang, "from the back door, from the place they found on the map" - from the richest recesses and most heartbreaking locales on earth, from careful daily attention, deftly woven melodies of knowing and needing to know - you can't read these poems without becoming part of larger history, deeper community, instantly. See "Sunday, the Windows Open." See "Rice." See "Ghazal." These poems, huge in their urgency, massive in their tender care and embrace--elements intertwined as the braided loaves in "Bread." This book deserves a bow. Naomi Shihab Nye, author of You and Yours, Fuel and Words Under the Words These are the poems of someone for whom history almost always takes the form of biography, whether in the life of an ancestor or of a contemporary, whether on the streets of her beloved Chicago or those of Baghdad. For Susanna Lang, history is so intimate that every life touches our own, if we pay attention--even that of a five thousand year old woman who ate, "the same fruit / I eat every morning." Because these poems are rendered with such honesty and compassion, we are invited not only to savor life but to revere it. With remarkable artistry, Lang reminds us that while we may not always wish it, we belong to each other. J. Stephen RhodesSusanna Lang's gracefully deceptive homages to rivers of ancestry and tomorrow weave complex, multi-layered narratives seamlessly, quietly. All threads quilted into dense sonic blankets rich in song and elegy. The quiet surprise, the solo dance all humans share, blurring lines of memory. Gwendolyn Brooks strove to find "the extraordinary in the ordinary." Lang mines the personal and historical geographies of a global citizenry, our collective missteps and buried laughter. Lang observes the tenuous ritual of living and our struggle to make sense of it, somehow. These are the incessant muted pleas of hope in endless wartime, whether the enemy is nature, ideology or self. This is a sensuous, effervescent collection. Quraysh Ali Lansana