Susan Berlin’s poems demand to be read from the first page to the last in one seemingly breathless sitting. Here the domestic is dangerous. This poet makes a music of loss and despair that catches us off guard. Her rhymes, rather than bringing closure or relief at a poem’s end, leave us vulnerable, a little wounded, recognizing our own sins of omission, the ways we’ve shut down to life. Berlin interrogates that numb place and, by the act of creation, reminds us what it’s like to come back from the loveless place, to breathe in life and be more.

–Anne Marie Macari, author of Red Deer