Words From the Liberated and Content by Susan Stevens

Description

Words From the Liberated and Content

by Susan Stevens

$14.99, paper

979-8-88838-032-1

2022

In the spirit of Kierkegaard and his adherents, these poems emphasize the power and opportunity of solitude and the virtue of living alone without being flagrantly antisocial.  There is virtue in partners keeping distance so as to avoid envelopment–and to spur creativity and contemplation.  “Too much of a good thing” characterizes the plight of many marriages; keeping the desirable, provocative tension between people may be a coextension of less, not more, nearness.

Susan Stevens has taught composition, literature, and creative writing on the Navajo reservation at Many Farms and at campuses in Tennessee, Georgia, and Arizona, including Yavapai College and Eastern Arizona College, where she partnered with the Arizona Commission on the Arts to direct the Visiting Writing Series. She received a bachelor’s in comparative literature from the University of Redlands and a master’s in creative writing under the tutelage of iconoclastic poet Jim Simmerman, late Regents’ Professor at Northern Arizona University. Finishing Line Press published her poetry collection Things We Might Miss (2017) and chapbooks With Ridiculous Caution (2013) and O, But in the Library (2017). A retired educator and federal employee, she is presently a freelance writer-editor in New Mexico and at work on the obligatory novel.