Brief description: Susan Kay Anderson, 2010 National Poetry Series Finalist, has an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Eastern Oregon University. Anderson was the poetry editor of Big Talk, a free publication in the early 1980s featuring Pacific Northwest punk bands. She earned degrees in anthropology from the University of Oregon (B.S.) and English Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Colorado, Boulder (M.A. & Jovanovich Award). Her poems, essays, stories, and interviews can be found in: Barrow Street Press 4 X 2 Project, Beat Scene, BlazeVOX Journal Spring 2016, Concis, Caliban Online, Guernica, Honolulu Civil Beat, Oregon East, Prairie Schooner, and Tom Clark Beyond The Pale. She lives in Eugene, Oregon.
Review Quotes:
A wonderful sense of the natural landscape, especially of the far West and North. Not just landscape portrait, but urgency, threat, and more than ever a need for solidarity.
--Fred Marchant, author of Said Not Said
Mezzanine is part animal dream, part love song / song of despair about the worlds that drift through the night janitor's empire, and part eternal desire to make meaning of the illogical evidence before us. The glittering poems by Susan Kay Anderson speak their own realities, talk amongst each other, and shape a world informed by the refusal to look away, desire for connection, and absolute attention to the details. It's this world of matter, how it drifts in and out of other matter, all of it stories and important, that informs this exciting work.
--Jennifer Boyden, author of The Mouths of Grazing Things
Mezzanine seems an especially apt title for Susan Kay Anderson's stunning debut collection. A "mezzanine," after all, is a story between stories, and throughout these pieces, which interweave narratives of people and places in the West, Anderson gives us ample space from which to look out, look up, and examine our own deepest selves. "My mind is a butterfly," she writes early in the book, and what a thrill it is to soar with her as she lights on each image and scene, offering up a meticulously observed collection of uncommon depth and heart.
--James Crews, author of Telling My Father and The Book of What Stays
Susan Kay Anderson's Mezzanine is a search for self by losing self. As a shamanic presence, she disappears into a number of landscapes, principally the area in and around Nome, Alaska. There is an amazing tension created by the quiet ecstasy of the voice that guides us through this life-dream. The long poem that provides the book's title is narrated by a night shift janitor who works in a university building. As she moves from room to room, area to area, she recovers pieces of her life, as if praying the stations of the cross. This brilliant book is both stylistically innovative and an emotionally moving experience.
--Lawrence R. Smith, author of The Plain Talk of the Dead, Editor and Publisher of
Caliban Online
Compact poems that continually delight and surprise, the poet's mind-scape conjures interlocking images through word play and rhythm that yield new meaning with each reading--taking the reader along with her 'so close to the sky'.
--Jonathan Chant, author of The Great Quest Of Celtic Mystery