Books by Susan Dworski Nusbaum

The poems in this collection travel across lifetimes, each twist and turn of the outer world reflecting an inner landscape, narratives unfolding against ever-changing backdrops- places, seasons, decades. They trace the complexities of an ordinary life through the histories and environments that gave them shape-shifting from homes and tree-lined neighborhoods, to a rain-soaked cemetery, an opera house in Hanoi, a beach in Ceylon, a village in Poland. In them are the contradictions and surprises, moods and modulations of individual experience, evoking both the transitory nature of our world and the timelessness of the human condition.

Moments of attentiveness illuminate our world, interrupting the rush of time to make each flash a revelation. Stopping to see what we may not have noticed, to listen, to feel, to remember past sensations, deepens our insights. This collection of poems examines the art of seeing with all the senses, unveiling the essential realities hidden in common objects and experiences. The attraction of rabbit to ripening pear, the crunch of shells on the beach, connections with strangers, with our families and places from the past, with a fresco, a wood engraving, a Bach oratorio... these small epiphanies are "the lingering strands of light...that bind each morning to the next."