Suzanne Cleary's The Odds is about chance: crazy luck, bad luck, about the luck of the draw, and what we make of that draw. Through arresting imagery and surprising turns, these narrative and contemplative poems examine the work of holding a job, of making art, of making sense of our historical moment. There is mortality and there is humor. There are references from Angie Dickinson to Edward Elgar. Cleary is a poet for whom everything feels, sometimes against the odds, connected. |
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Suzanne Cleary does, as Wordsworth wrote, see into the life of things. The language of her poetry is clear as just-washed windows&emdash;or maybe I should say an open window, because I feel as though there's no distance between the scenes that Cleary delivers and me. With compelling detail and surprising turns, she considers the odds of our very survival, of maintaining our delicate balance of being "breakable but never broken." These poems offer a poignant tenderness in encounters with art, literature, history, and memory, small moments of transformation, "like a tear in fabric, through which light passes." This is a poet who reminds us"Attention is love," and I love these poems.
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—Ellen Bass (author of Indigo)
Suzanne Cleary's The Odds speaks of the tender moments of unknowing in all of us. In sure-footed lines, these poems cover great distance: from the foibles we all experience to our dreams of bigger worlds. This moving collection creates breath, and room to travel between worlds as we speak to the dead as well as the living.
—Jan Beatty (author of Dragstripping)
Suzanne Cleary's poems brim with curiosity, insight, and humor, each a testament to keen observation and ready imagination. She writes about a worry stone, a green glove, a young poet waiting in line for his mother's prescription, about artists and actors, and lesser-known others we must remember. She is a poet who takes us somewhere we've never been and want to stay.
—Mara Bergman (author of The Night We Were Dylan Thomas)
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