Suzanne Marks Squires
Em Press
Mill Valley, CA
1998
ISBN 1-889589-00-4
$45
[32] p., 12.5 x 5.25
Signed & numbered edition of 150
Colophon
Fournier digital type and drawing by Philip Going printed letterpress from photopolymer plates on a Vandercook SP15. Lana Laid text paper and Japanese lace endpapers sewn into St. Armand handmade paper covers. Black & violet inks. Violet cover. Designed & printed by Dale Going at Em Press.
Exhibited in BOOK WORKS: Pacific Center for the Book Arts Members’ Exhibition, San Francisco Public Library June 9-July 31, 1999 and in Livres de poètes (femmes) at the Berkeley Art Center, June 2000.
It was a wind ago
since I was a wind
blowing rain around
a butterfly with
storm glass wings
it was a wind ago
since I was a storm.
The measure of the twenty-one poems in this first book is barometric, a vertical exertion, the rising or falling of air pressure or breath. Or a grasping at ladder-rungs: the grasp is emphatic, the hold on each word released completely. Then, suspended in air, the reach for the next word-rung. There is a Japanese quality to these poems, as though the haiku form were transposed to a vertical linearity with its original language intact; an echo of Neidecker, as though formed from air thick with water, suspended in pearl-glow. This is a poetry of reflections and reversals; the clarity imposed by its pairings is mirror or lake-like.
Suzanne Marks Squires lives in Pennsylvania. This is her first publication. I was introduced to her luminous work by Barbara Guest.