A Chair Keeps the Floor Down by Susan Dambroff

Susan Dambroff‘s poems are rich, image-filled love songs to her students, to nature, to the art of teaching.  They observe injustice and pain, as well as healing and joy with a tender generosity.

–Marylee McNeal, The Space Between us and The Way We Fall

A Chair Keeps the Floor Down—this is elegant logic that Susan Dambroff honors and celebrates in this collection of poems inspired by children who often spin rather than speak. As a teacher, she corrals them “into loops of captivating play.” And in poem after poem, these same loops of play, holding close the brilliant and hard moments of a life’s work that often moves beyond the school into families and communities.  Then closing the classroom for the last time, retiring to “spacious regard” we feel the exhalation and the tenderness of leaving.

–Jacqueline Berger, The Gift That Arrives Broken