Blue Atlas - by Susan Rich (Paperback)

About the Book

Blue Atlas, the sixth book of poems from award-winning poet Susan Rich, is her most original work to date.

Book Synopsis

Blue Atlas is a lyrical abortion narrative unlike any other. This one-of-a-kind collection follows a Jewish woman and her ghosts as they travel from West Africa to Europe and, finally, to the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco. The speaker searches repeatedly for a new outcome, seeking answers in a myriad of mediums such as an online questionnaire, a freshman composition essay, and a curriculum vitae. The raw, often far from idyllic experience of a global love affair that results in an unplanned pregnancy is examined and meditated upon through a surreal prism. The Blue Atlas, a genus of the common cedar tree first found in the High Atlas of Morocco and known for its beauty and resilience, becomes a metaphor for the hardship and power of a fully engaged life.

Review Quotes

"These poems acknowledge, in a deeply admirable way, a sense of personal brokenness which is woven into the book's fabric like 'small' pieces of 'spiritual' cloth kept over from west Africa ('Wedding Dress, ' p. 51)." --Ben Keatinge, The Manhattan Review

Featured in the Shelf Unbound list of 2024 Indie Summer Reads

"I want to heartily recommend Susan Rich's newest book, Blue Atlas. If you know her work, you're one of the lucky ones--and if you don't--you're about to become one of the lucky ones. The opening poem, "This Could Happen" is the perfect one for pulling the reader inside." --Maggie Smith

"The remarkable poems of Blue Atlas chart an expansive life which spins around an epicenter of loss, but loss is too tame a word, really, for what this speaker bears. 'I am a woman swollen with the history of my dead, ' Rich writes, 'a body awash in stories.' She describes an imperiled childhood and a young adulthood that culminates in a coerced midterm abortion, which 'stays suspended in resin / like a tiny scorpion, / transforming anger into amber.' Blue Atlas exquisitely performs the way trauma--the utter loss of self-determination, of choice--can turn a life to seawater, to drift, to 'somehow, the might still be--' mapping 'constellations of in-between, ' suspended between deciding and undeciding, from a space outside of the circumference of longing, where poetry lives."--Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets

"Plaintive and ferocious by turns, the voice in Susan Rich's poems keeps asking the same question: 'Does anyone escape her own story?' The answer, of course, is no, especially when the effects of an early loss keep troubling the later decades of a life, exerting measures of devastation, regret, and nostalgia. Blue Atlas is Rich's sixth book of poems, and it marks an apotheosis--an apotheosis that, as the title suggests, is suffused with amplitude and intimacy, woundedness and wonder. Rich has arrived at a place of wisdom in her work, enthralled by still another essential question: 'what is this heaviness // embedded in our good luck-- / this sharp, bronzed hinge?'"--Rick Barot, author of Moving the Bones

"Blue Atlas is both compelling and challenging, nuanced and boundary-breaking. Susan Rich fearlessly plunges her readers into discussions that many writers avoid, guiding them through with a speaker as engaging as the various poetic forms she uses. Rich is a bold poet, whose work resonates in our present moment." --Tyler Truman Julian, The Shore

"Rich's language is honest, raw, and emotion-driven. The poems retell the
speaker's story from different vantage points, using a range of
forms--including questionnaires, an outline for a freshman essay, and a
curriculum vitae, among others--to explore feelings of guilt, regret,
loneliness, and self-doubt"--Leonora Simonovis, The Poetry Foundation

"Reading Blue Atlas was a kaleidoscopic journey for me; I felt transported into the speaker's intricately threaded narratives, following her linguistic signage through each page as I would a trusted guide. From an abortionist's clinic to the Saharan desert, a childhood basement to the speaker's kitchen, I felt drawn into the many worlds and landscapes, including her own interior topography, that Rich as author/auteur renders within her meticulous mise-en-scène." --Sarah Carey, Tinderbox Poetry Journal

"'This is not an anti-abortion poem, ' she promises in one piece titled 'The Abortion Question.' And it isn't. But that poem, and the rest, coalesce into a searingly honest narrative of choices, consequences, and -- ultimately -- capability." --Barbara Lloyd McMichael, Coast Weekend