Susan Aizenberg

Susan Aizenberg uses a range of techniques in her newest collection of poetry to explore contemporary daily life in a difficult world. She critiques gender, grief, culture, and the myriad experiences that define us. But even when grappling with old wounds, a strain of romance runs throughout the book, reminding readers that it's between the love and the grief that we'll find the moments worth being shared and savored.

Many of these poems are set in the mid-twentieth century and feature such personae as writers Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams and photographer Roman Vishniac, as well as less-public figures in Brooklyn, Nebraska, and elsewhere, all of whom confront the wounds of love, family, history, and time.

Muse, the first full-length collection from poet Susan Aizenberg, brings together poems of personal history, elegy, and the complex lives of artists, writers, and ""ordinary"" people, in an exploration of the relationship between art and life, esthetics and ethics. She is sharp-eyed in purpose, trying to understand ""what love is"" in a continual shifting between loss and knowledge. While ""there is no other world than this one"" for Aizenberg, nevertheless she finds a world of affirmation. Aizenberg sings elegant blues, keeps a perfect balance between elaboration and restraint with formal skill that is both impressive and consoling, reminding us that poetry is a form of intelligence in which music creates a world full of mystery and depth. Cortland, 1970 Always Monday, light October drizzle misting our hair, wet-wool musk of our peacoats. Remember your father's library? Three-for-a-buck novels, all the rosy headlights he could dream, group-gropes he couldn't. Breakfast was beer in a jelly glass. Then the ten-block walk, hardscrabble shacks imploding, to swing shift at Smith Corona. I still have the scar acid etched through my jeans that first night. Peeling them down in the ladies' room, I found a black