“Breathing: American Sonnets” is a collection of poems about the human condition: loss, abundance, trauma, hope and courage. Written before the Pandemic, these poems speak to the tasks of daily living we have always attended to but since March 2020, have become more vivid. The poems are written in sonnet form both because the language of poetry deserves the careful consideration form brings. What we care about as human beings calls upon our passion, and to live passionately, no matter what we bring ourselves to, is always available to us, in the hardest of times and in the good. Carolyn Wyeth’s painting “The Distant Shore” visually, profoundly captures the distant light that, here in Maine, the sea lends us on the darkest of days.
Author Bio
Susan Cook is a poet, essayist, psychotherapist and play therapist who lives and works on the Coast of Maine. She paid a printer to publish her first poetry collection when she was 15. Her poems book Blue: American Sonnets was collected in 2014.
Praise:
The poet Susan Cook has said that, given what’s happened to free speech, “form may be coming back”, and in her new collection form comes back, in sonnets of great intelligence and beauty. She says “My sonnet’s yours America… It is so hard to write you this sonnet.”
These sonnets are carefully crafted structures, this Breathing, this work is alive and Breathing, pulsing in rhythmic language, stories of power, and pain, Poems. Susan Cook says “Breathing is my common sacrifice, my sustenance, my being, now breathing, mine.” and we breath with her, lucky to have these words. —Gary Lawless, awarded the 2017 Constance H. Carlson Public Humanities Prize by the Maine Humanities Council
