The Laugh We Make When We Fall

In Susan Firer’s The Laugh We Make When We Fall, peonies; snow drops, with all their survivor ecstasies ; windy caravans of lilacs ; and Dali Lama-robed
daylilies act as magnets to attract history-personal and historical-myths, language, facts, love, gratitude, prayers, beauty, and all the colors of death and sex. Family oddities appear in this collection, as well as Catholic rituals, saints, and ghost poets. Always ghost poets: Whitman, Neruda, Thoreau, and Saint Francis.

In these poems, toads/ pull their finished skins off/ delicately as evening gloves, and in Birds you can look into an injured bird’s neck and see everywhere it had ever flown… see insects, & seeds, & amphibians, / & even a piece or two of snake. Using list poems, exploded elemental odes, lyrics, and American sonnets, Firer writes her own survivor ecstasies: I was buried under/deaths: mother’s, father’s, sisters’ deaths wrapped me/ like surgical wrap. And who and where would I be/ when all their gauzy deaths were removed? In poem after poem in this collection, Firer begins to explore and to answer that question. This collection is a wild generosity of spirit, creating an effect that is sacramental.

Jacket note from Billy Collins, Poet Laureate of the United States: To read the poetry of Susan Firer is to enter a unique building constructed by the imagination, like Kubla Khan’s pleasure-dome, out of the shimmering material of words. These poems reveal a love of language both for its own dear sake and for its ability to deliver the news some of us cannot live without.