Break and Enter

Susannah Sheffer writes poems for the same reason people place pebbles on headstones - to mark both the loss and its marking, to acknowledge that grief has physical weight and to release a little bit of it, to "leave evidence" and "show what we mean." And her poems are like those stones: small, solid, timeless, wholly themselves and whole unto themselves. If life is going to break us, Sheffer is going to spend hers producing durable things.

- Eric McHenry, author of Odd Evening

"We all know how complicated/the heart is, how it.../expects to be swindled" - yet, Susannah Sheffer reminds us, we "cannot say no to it." I'm in awe of the craft of these poems, how throughout this work, dualities are not only masterfully revealed but also honored. The speaker in the poems acknowledges the duality of everything and does so with the smooth ease of acceptance. Here, the broken glistens like pieces of glass held up to light. This book's seductive poems are the maps of feelings that give you "somewhere else to go." I will return to these poems again and again.

- Joy Gaines-Friedler, author of Capture Theory