This Visit

Poetry. In Susan Lewis's THIS VISIT, each poem becomes a complex plot of phrasing that doubles back with contradictory meanings and proceeds forward with dead-on accuracy. Lewis's brilliant word-play subverts language with wit and precision. While reading these poems, I feel as though I am wandering through landscapes that continue to change as Lewis's powerful voice guides me through her terrain of wit and ideas-- and she is in control. Her use of ambiguity gives multiple meanings to her poems with lines like this: 'But (you say) / some of my best friends are-- /to which I nod: / decay?' This is a cerebral collection of poems written with humor and detail; Lewis delights with sleight-of-hand mastery in each poem.--Mary Kasimor

Like a curious echo returned to the reader patiently perched at each poem's mouth, THIS VISIT is cavernous. It leads you deep. Into unexpected spaces, resonating and illuminated by Susan Lewis's intuitive ear and playful elasticity of language. Look around and listen closely. You will find the world carved here to be less replica and more simulacrum of the familiar surface above. Lewis returns to us the original primordial rhythms and rhymes engrained in our bones...but she does so slant. So that, whether you read this book aloud or silently to yourself, the voice that calls back to you from below is neither hers nor yours alone.--Travis Macdonald

Susan Lewis's THIS VISIT is a dissonant pastiche of many lost voices connecting, a series of lost letters that have found an intimate listener. Yet these lyrical and profoundly intelligent dissonances contain bodies, distances, the real presence of the material world, 'your desire and your embedded thorn.' Only the 'ungod' gives these spaces their form, their voice, their substance; after all, God is 'watching like a prisoner' from the world of these poems, constantly struggling to take form, like Michelangelo's slaves emerging from the half-hewn stone, or Duchamp's nude descending a multitude of staircases in shimmering half lines and half steps and snatches of overheard lines. This is a poetry of 'the flesh rolled and soothing, eyes nosing over lipped seam, ' and the visitation yearns for a connection as deep and ephemeral as being touched.--Sam Witt

In the fissures and gaps of a malleable lexicon, Susan Lewis's playful, punning, musical lyrics create spaces for a reader to explore. In her 'mythic stickiness' edges are blurred in service to an 'everlasting loop.' Her poems are oddly intimate, full of a wise skepticism and a quirky grace--perhaps more of a place to live in than to visit.--Joanna Fuhrman

The question arising is: do rest or do you reach? Are you a machine stroker or a poem stoker? Or maybe, do you both? These poems swerve in that place between choice and choicelessness, and call out to trouble the stasis.--Eleni Sikelianos