Susan Firer • The Laugh We Make When We Fall

• The Backwaters Prize 2004 •

A wild generosity of spirit and vision characterizes this collection. The language marries the elemental and worldly with aplomb, and the effect is sacramental. A wedding lies at the heart of this book, impure life in the arms of mortality. From this union a sensual spirituality bears the eros of our bodies in this time and space. The subject of the book is humble even as it is universal, hovering as it does over and within that great oxymoron, human love, which drives us to remember why we are here, to practice faithfulness to the world, and to give blood. Both fierce and vulnerable, these poems possess a Whitmanian fertility, raised by a grace wholly female to carry the consciousness in which we move through this century and to the seventh generation.
   • CarolAnn Russell - Author of Gypsy Taxi

To read the poetry of Susan Firer is to enter a unique building constructed by the imagination, like Kublai Kahn'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.
   • Billy Collins - Poet Laureate of the United States, 2001-2003

About the Author:

Susan Firer's poetry has been published in literary magazines such as Chicago Review and Iowa Review, and in anthologies such as Best American Poetry of 1992. In addition to The Backwaters Prize for 2001, she has won the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Prize, and was named Milwaukee's Poet Laureate in 2008. Firer received her Master's degree from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, where she is Assistant Professor of English.