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Roam
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Roam explores the loss of a parent to cancer
and the resulting uprootedness that loss can create. In searching
for a sense of home and belonging, this collection of free verse
looks both inward and outward, to landscapes rural and urban, and
speaks in haunting and musical lyrics. Unexpected voices emerge
from history and myth—those of Joan of Arc, Ophelia, Circe,
Daedalus and Icarus, and Achilles’ mother, Thetis—to
mingle with the author’s own voice. From the naming of the
first woman, Eve, to the naming of the first European child born
in the Americas, Virginia Dare, these characters seek full houses
and, instead, discover empty ones. In a voice that is southern,
feminist, and unflinching in its assessments of the self, Somers-Willett
treats personal loss without ceremony or nostalgia. The poems of
Roam look homeward while acknowledging that one can never
return to such elusive comforts and reveal the dangers and delights
of an ever-changing, ever-traveling sense of self.
“Somers-Willett wonderfully teeters between subtlety and brashness.... This is a smart collection that nicely underplays a confident, feminist voice in a very real world, where questions of identity and home are written with an often terse self-reflection. Playful without being self-indulgent, there is little emotional relief in these poems. This poet is tough. And to draw thematically from the cast of characters she has put together, it would not be inappropriate to suggest this book of poems gets to the heart of the ancient command: Know thyself." “ Somers-Willett’s poems become an act of active reading, a game where you connect the meanings between the title and each line, each line to each other line, and those lines to other people’s poems.... Roam’s poems are generally aggressive in form and content. The poems are tightly constructed, each line a careful unit that often turns in meaning with the jump to the next line.... Susan B. A. Somers-Willett has written a beautiful, sad, and passionate book.” —American Book Review “Susan Somers-Willett’s Roam is not so much a debut as a laying of claim: Poetry is her birthright by virtue of a spiritual bloodline that makes her the child of Whitman and Rukeyser. On these roads of our country, she tells us, the soul is a beautiful thing that can, after so much horror and mischief are unearthed, grid the land with compassion. Championing gnosis rather than decrying lost innocence, her poems balance wit and sobriety, lyricism and the spondees of truth. I am thrilled by the joy she conjures, and the grace of her accomplishment.” —Khaled Mattawa, author of Zodiac of Echoes “There’s a breathtaking, sly intellect at work in the luscious poems of Roam. Susan B. A. Somers-Willett spins an elegant geography of vast terrains and intricate histories. Her poems make unexpected landings and linkages everywhere. And I’ll bet you want to keep reading “In Memory of a Girl” over and over again as long as you live. I do.” —Naomi Shihab Nye, author of You & Yours “Deftly crafted and threaded with a fierce lyricism, Roam is Somers-Willett's tour-de-force, a vibrant collection that will stamp the genre with her unflinching signature. A moving cycle of poems chronicling the trial of Joan of Arc provides the pulse for this volume, but the poet goes on to rip the veneer from a varied range of topics. A boxer's wife bemoans shifts of mind and muscle. Even an interstate highway takes on voice. It's immensely gratifying to see such a primal connection to the language, to sense light beneath each lean stanza, to witness one woman shout out from the muddle of cookie-cutter poetics. Roam is a revolution.” —Patricia Smith, author of
Teahouse of the Almighty, “Susan B.A. Somers-Willett is a poet of expansive vision, who travels the mindscape of memory with a profound intimacy, a keeper of distances, defining both the world of the commonplace and the sprawling terrain of uncharted human nature. Her compelling images in Roam are the work of a sorceress, haunting the senses with the lyric dance of language.” —James Ragan, author of Lusions and The Hunger Wall
Robert Carroll, Publicity Manager
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