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| Cover art by Linda Stulic |
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Suzanne Roberts’ poems in Plotting Temporality are songs of the body, the erotic imperative of flesh, the brutal finality of bone. These haunting necessities are exquisitely explored in a poem such as “Skeleton,” where lovemaking takes place within the “jutted pelvis,” where the lover’s hands, cruel and tender, grasp a figure “stripped clean without the canvas of skin,” a figure urgent, sensual, and grotesque. Roberts’ poems forcefully invoke “our night, our moon, but never, / never our dawn,” their language striving to shape and illuminate our haunted movements—a caress, a spouse’s hand pushed away, a figure approaching from the shadows, embraced with fateful longing.
—Gaylord Brewer
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The worlds Suzanne Roberts speaks into being in Plotting Temporality flicker with shadow and light, sometimes igniting into bold vision, sometimes mapping what is missing. These poems cast spells. They are charms and chants that draw new shapes from the natural world, giving the familiar a new dimension, a mystery that compels us to follow. There is a lovely and unexpected alchemy in these verses that veer from the stars to suburbia, from the sublime to sweaty reality, and leave traces of each in the other. Roberts has a powerful range: equally adept at ferocity and fragility, and a host of other apparent opposites, she is a borderless writer and an absolute joy to read. – June Sylvester Saraceno
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“In an age where cultures, people, and place are so easily objectified, reduced to abstractions, commodities, or statistics, Three Hours to Burn a Body is a collection that returns us, thankfully, to earth. Across India, China, and Mongolia, to California, England, and all over Latin America, Suzanne Roberts shares the view at ground level, the brutality and grace and sometimes transcendence in the lives of everyday people. She reminds us that travel can be an act of remembrance. This is an important and moving work.” - David Miller
“Suzanne Roberts’ book of travel poems flits with the sadness of blue butterflies through the Amazon rainforest (a green dream turning to the scarred crackle of grass and stumps). It washes to shore in Nicaragua with garbage and American tourists who hunt the cobblestoned streets for child prostitutes giggling in their mothers’ make-up. Roberts travels the world on the margin of desire, with the freedom of loneliness, and these poems are the flame that ‘twists from the ghost of an eye,’ the flame of bodies burning and raining in our hair like ash, they are dawn prayers from a mosque, and the sun like a tangerine behind the gauzy net of the world. Journey with this book, and you will hear in that strange passage the pathos of all passages through, and the glancing knowledge of what it means to be in time, trying to understand what goes by ‘like a stranger’s secret [you] overhear in passing.’” - Tony Barnstone
“Each poem takes us beyond the song of the body and shadow, and asks us to rise above the mist, the rain, and the hours. And without realizing, we find a new way of travelling. Provoking and thrilling!” - Nathalie Handal
“Suzanne Roberts' Three Hours to Burn a Body is a powerful collection of lyrics that explores physical and emotional journeys. Roberts is an especially strong observer of delicate emotional nuances, and places those scenes against the backdrop of travels through foreign countries.” - Kevin Walzer
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“Sensual and unabashed, Suzanne Roberts’ poems draw you into a world where “it isn’t enough to walk over/ the bridge. You must/ look under it, see how/wind distorts your reflection.” Roberts walks with you “in the space between dripping ferns,” takes you where “the leaving becomes/part of the other world, / of sleep, of dreams,” where “dawn unties/ the earth from sky.” Nothing to You is an arresting collection of poems where the poet’s gaze is unblinking even as she admits, “I should look away now, but don’t.” - Sholeh Wolpé, author of The Scar Saloon and Rooftops of Tehran
“Suzanne Roberts weaves together restlessness, travel experiences, and a healthy strand of suspicion, creating a tapestry both intriguing and mysterious. Often conversational with suggestive language, rife with images yet understated, Roberts' poems promise adventures both physical and mental, grand and private, cloaked in an atmosphere of spoiled romance and esthetic longing.” - Stephen Reichert, Editor, Smartish Pace
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| Front cover for "Shameless" |
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| Back cover for "Shameless" |
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“Usually, if one is shameless, she is defined by her bold lack of shame, her refusal to conduct herself with a sense of decency—she is perhaps a shameless liar, a shameless promoter, a shameless hussy. But Suzanne Roberts' poetry embraces the sexual journeys of her narrators, reclaiming "shamelessness," as a place in which there is no shame, where there should be no shame. Roberts' voice is instead full of sass, savoir-fare, and self-confidence as her lyrical and narrative intermingle. Her control of the line, her exact and surprising imagery make her poems deliciously complex. Shameless is a powerful, sensuous romp—intimate, funny, honest.”
- Denise Duhamel, author of Two and Two, Kinky, Queen for a Day, and Mille et un sentiments, Oyl, and The Star-Spangled Banner.
“Suzanne Roberts' narrator intuits the subtle psychological borders that determine our behavior, especially when it comes to sexual love. Not only do her poems insinuate themselves into the hidden, unbound fields of play between people encountering each other, but they explore the rules each individual person plays by, even when that person doesn't know it herself. Her tightly controlled free verse poems set us on a strange, revelatory ride into the self.”
- Kevin Clark, author of In the Evening of No Warning and In the Mind's Eye
“Suzanne Roberts' most recent collection, Shameless, contains poems of infinite scope, taking us to places we long to visit but, normally, refuse to book passage, simply because the price is too high for the self-discovery the journey offers. Here, however, the poet graciously agrees to peel away the protection we often employ, demanding "seven layers of larval skin" from her readers who are fortunate enough to take the trip.”
- Bart Edelman, author of The Last Mojito, Gentle Man and Alphabet of Love, and editor of Eclipse
“Despite its brassy, sassy title, Suzanne Roberts' Shameless is a deadly serious book. Roberts takes the reader on a journey through heartbreak and loneliness to a brighter, stronger place. Her poems are haunting in their understatement. Intimate, longing with memory but recognizing the sober present, Shameless is a vital book of poems.”
- Kevin Walzer, Editor of Wordtech Communications and author of Greater Circles and Austere Offices
“Using vibrant short lines, this poem’s (“Verbs of Being”) unusual architecture offers us the rich lexicon of its sensual imagery.” - Paulann Peterson, author of The Wild Awake, Blood Silk, and A Bride of Narrow Escape
“Suzanne Roberts’ “Hesitation” is one of my favorites for its subtle capturing of infidelity through a landscape’s details and a few human gestures.”
- NEWPAGES.COM
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