Out of Nowhere

978-1-62288-237-3 Paperback
6 x 9 x 0 in
80 pp.
Pub Date: 04/15/2022
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Out of Nowhere, Susan Comninos’ debut collection of poetry, uses beautiful imagery and complicated literary forms to explore what it means to be a woman, a daughter, and above all what it means to be human. Comninos is a widely published and award-winning poet whose work has been featured in various journals throughout the country. This timely collection carries themes of bodies and human connection as it winds through the diverse and varied characters and settings. Comninos brings a feminist, relevant voice to the old themes of love, loss, and finding beauty in broken people.

In Out of Nowhere, Susan Comninos pays homage to the long and varied traditions of poets who have come before her and turns poetry on its head. In these pages, “No barrow depends on this / trio of hens,” nudists visiting an art museum become the spectacle themselves, and maple buds “fist their way / Open.” On each page, a gift—a surprise—a riot of language!
                                                                  --Shaindel Beers, author of Secure Your Own Mask, finalist for the Oregon Book Award
 
There is such a fierce and tender ache in Susan Comninos’s Out of Nowhere. It’s an ache that you’ll recognize even as you find yourself astonished by the ways Comninos is able to make it new. And new again. And that may be the greatest of her achievements in this collection—to dazzle us with what we already know as if we’re discovering it for the first time.
                      --Derek Pollard, author of On the Verge of Something Bright and Good and series editor for the Poets on Poetry Series published by the University of Michigan Press
 
These Out of Nowhere poems are sassy, provocative, perfectly cut. The fantasy of nudists visiting the Louvre, in “Naked Admission: A Fantasy,” is a wild, well-wrought hoot. The manuscript holds great depth, too, in breakthrough poems such as “Childlessness” or “Lullaby.” These poems are “to be of use,” as Marge Piercy once wrote. Their use is to delight, console and nurture our spirits through troubled times.
                                 --Marilyn Kallet is the author of 19 books, including How Our Bodies Learned and the forthcoming Even When We Sleep.


 

Published by Stephen F. Austin University Press