The Cartographer's Tongue

by Susan Rich

Qustions of geography, ethnic identity, and the corssing of cultural borders keep company with poetic form in this first collection of work.

“These poems will wound you and haunt you, but the larger knowing they bring is crucial . Susan Rich is a caring citizen of every heartland.”—Naomi Shihab Nye

“Susan Rich gives us a collection of poems...generous in the range and power of their emotion.”—J. M. Coetzee

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Susan is the author of five collections of poetry including the most recently released, Gallery of Postcards and Maps: New and Selected Poems. She is also co-editor of The Strangest of Theatres: Poets Writing Across Borders. Her four previous books are Cloud Pharmacy, The Alchemist's Kitchen, finalist for the Foreword Prize, Cures Include Travel and The Cartographer’s Tongue: Poems of the World. She is the winner of the PEN USA Award for Poetry and the Peace Corps Writers Award.

Recent poems appear in The Antioch Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Diode, Southern Review, Harvard Review, and Poetry International. Susan Rich grew up in Boston, Massachusetts but has since become a confirmed Seattlite. When she read in Bosnia and Slovenia the audience burst into laughter at the word "Seattlite" in a poem, mistaking it for satellite. Later, someone explained to Susan that this was funny because Americans come from out of space.
Interview with Elizabeth Glixman at http://www.eclectica.org/v9n4/glixman...

Rich teaches English and Film Studies at Highline College outside Seattle, WA where she is also a co-founder of Poets on the Coast: A Writing Retreat for Women. She has worked in Bosnia, Niger, West Bank and Gaza, and South Africa on behalf of human rights.

Reviews

[James Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Susan Rich has written a book of poems about travel. Like a compass she points to some of the places she worked while in the Peace Corps and while working for various service agencies in such places as South Africa, Bosnia, and Gaza, to name a few. She writes lyrically about these regions and about those things associated with travel to distant destinations. Many of the poems are about the serious challenges facing the people who live there. In writing about what she found in Niger or Sarajevo or Mexico she focuses the reader's consciousness on poor conditions or the plight of social groups. But rather than denunciatory her language is seductive. Her tone is often celebratory and proud. Her subjects are even sometimes erotic. A poem about an irritating seat mate on a flight is followed by meeting a man in a restaurant. Geography itself is a subject, and maps. There are poems about the language of maps and how to read their information. My favorite, though, is called "Wendy in the '90's," a wonderfully whimsical piece which talks of a new, liberated Wendy who'd refuse to sew shadows or cook alligator but would, instead, start a union for mermaids and find counseling for Peter. It's an oasis in a landscape of poems describing the harsh realities scattered across geographies of the real and the imagination.

[Andrea Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Each of these poems is a story. A journey worth embarking on. I am fortunate to own this collection. Susan Rich is a truly a poet of the highest order.

[PEN Center USA · Rating 5 out of 5]

2001 PEN Center USA Award Winner for Poetry

[Tim Lepczyk · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall, a pretty solid collection. I understand why writers feel like they need a theme and then need to stay true to that theme, but I became tired of reading so many poems with the words "travel" "map" and "place" in them. A good collection for the displaced and expatriates.