The Fortunate Islands - Tapa blanda

"These poems are sure-footed, engaging, broad in subject matter but grounded in the poet's wary detective-mind. I have a strong feeling for the most "psychological" of the poems, and those with psychological twists in the last stanza. The poems in this collection feel emotionally complete." - Sandra McPherson, author of Expectation Days"

This is the debut full-length poetry collection from Susan Kelly-DeWitt. Here we embark upon a carefully observed voyage through the century's grave concerns: "the Bomb/finally fallen, the world burned-up/the entire planet radioactive"; we travel through complex personal events and childhood betrayals, and through the cruelties, mysteries and epiphanies of the natural world. From the opening ghazal to the spare title poem at the end, Kelly-DeWitt finds voices of the silenced and the marginalized speaking with surprises of diction, form, and line breaks. She punctuates the poems with references to the visual arts, with allusions to Millet in "Bales Along Highway 4," to O'Keeffe in "Red Hills and Bone," to poems about artists and their lives. In the end the poems in "The Fortunate Islands" function as a personal and spiritual survival guide.