Little Prayers

While a poem is traditionally an artifact, these poems make you feel like you are the artifact, having been crafted by them, as if they have always existed. And yet despite that peculiar species of infinity, a Susie Meserve poem is always happening this morning, some Wednesday, March, the solstice, and the speaker navigates a (refreshingly) tangible topography of place: a ballpark, a still lake, a New England glacial valley, the Dakotas, 42,000 feet above a shoebox, Taipei, Pompeii, Mars. Mars was a god, and as with Mars, we have both reached and failed to reach God, and the poet knows this (here, in this book) better than I could ever describe. She is simultaneously a visionary masked as a suburban shopper sifting through apples and the apples themselves, undulating across a mysterious swell of days, nights, days — both praying to and resisting some luminous, apple-y god. There exists in this book a marvelous interplay between a boundless knowing and a boundless unknowing — Susie Meserve is no doubt herself an oracle: "Every time I open my mouth, something hops in," she sings. I have already hopped in, I am hopping in, and I am about to hop in. Join me. Susie Meserve grew up outside of Boston and was educated at Tufts University and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Her poems have appeared in Indiana Review, Cimarron Review, Bateau, Gulf Coast, and others. She is also the author of the chapbook Faith (Finishing Line Press). She lives in Berkeley, California, with her husband and two young sons.