Description
Sugar on the Floor was selected by the editors of Gunpowder Press as winner of the John Ridland Poetry Prize.
Praise for Sugar on the Floor
Susan Gubernat is a synergistic shapeshifting poet who circumvents background noise to focus on life, the universe, and the deeper, richer totality of all living things. Sometimes Neruda, Plath, or Eurydice. Sometimes a toad, an owl, an elegy. But more often music, France, an odyssey. This is a spectacular poet who really loves to dance and rock.
—Richard Peabody, editor/publisher Gargoyle Magazine
Susan Gubernat’s Sugar on the Floor is paced as mindfully as a walk through a sculpture garden, measuring monuments to memory and change. The poet’s acute vision considers our distance from these dignified shapings of experience, our acceptance or rejection and the phases of nuanced understanding in between. We might stand outside, listening, knowing what women know, about women, and artists, those who live life carefully, or we might hear the roar of the unjust crowd cheering the death of the bull and wish for the reversal that lust brings to eternity.
—Lisa Lewis, author of Present and Future Storm
These poems are a triumph of craft, with a voice ranging seamlessly from observations of nature to mythology to metaphysics to love in all its aspects. Gubernat’s images stun with their precision: the “choreography of the praying mantis”; a cheek’s “emery roughness”; pomegranate juice “vampiring / down our arms”; three doves “round as putty.” The poems bear witness to a life fully embraced, from childhood on, with no shrinking from its pain or loss and with a bracingly honest account of its joys. The title comes from the poem “Like Sugar on the Floor,” which ends, “And hooked as we are, we come back for more.” You’ll get hooked on these poems, and you’ll keep coming back for more.
—Lynne Knight, author of The Language of Forgetting
Susan Gubernat, poet and librettist, is the author of The Zoo at Night which won The Prairie Schooner Raz/Shumaker Book Prize (University of Nebraska Press), Analog House (Finishing Line Press), and Flesh, which won the Marianne Moore Prize (Helicon Nine Editions). Her poems have appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle as well as Anacapa Review, Cimarron Review, Crab Orchard Review, Gargoyle, The Hudson Review, Michigan Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, and other journals and anthologies. She wrote the libretto for the three-act opera “Korczak’s Orphans” with composer Adam Silverman. Their latest collaboration, the song cycle “Elegy for the Earth,” was released on the label New Focus Recordings. She has been awarded multiple residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, the Millay Colony, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and received artist fellowships from the states of New Jersey and New York. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is Professor Emerita of English at California State University, East Bay. Born and raised in Newark, New Jersey, she now lives in San Francisco.
