…ABOUT SUSAN TERRIS:
Shirley Kaufman:
There seems to be no limit to the range of experience and empathy in the far-reaching poems of Susan Terris. Out of a life passionately lived and remembered, she has constructed a bold map for survival and self-understanding. Her wisdom, dazzle of language, imaginative exploration of time and nature, and amazing appetite for risk and "dark surprise" make NATURAL DEFENSES a book to treasure.
David St. John:
Susan Terris's poetry is exquisite and extraordinary. Her poems exhibit an intellectual verve and a linguistic brilliance that are remarkable. There are fewpoets who can so deftly orchestrate the dramatic dilemmas of the daily with the profound wisdoms of the larger world.
Ronald Wallace:
Susan Terris teases out the terror of the everyday, the elegies for all our lost selves. She is a true original, a remarkable, remarkable poet."
Eleanor Wilner:
Even as "sailors know a storm / is close when all their knots have drawn tight," so these taut, intricate poems enact the dramatic encounter of opposing forces: high Romantic flight meets gravity's tow, Chagall's floating figures ride the tornado, fire exacts its inevitable toll as the dreamer awakens— eloquent, unrepentant.
Li-Young Lee:
These poems are our fondest human wishes and hopes given voice. They report the world’s abundance and richness even amid loss and pain.
Susan Terris
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