Farther Format: TradePaperback

Fantastic New Work by visionary poet Susan Thackrey / seeing through the waters.

Evoking Homer, the sea, and our particularity as humans who face choices, with and against orders, Susan Thackrey, a poet in the line of Robert Duncan and the literary and psychological classics, writes a compelling whole book which keeps us in its wave (and waves) as it seeks "for some / common / rhyme"+AV91 and finds more than one might imagine. Poetry of this sort compels us to look within, and to connect that inner vision to the world. Place Thackrey in the company of H.D., Virginia Woolf, Robert Duncan, and Sappho. This is a glorious book.

"There is a father in FARTHER, and in epigraphs from Homer and Robert Duncan, who imagined the blind Homer hanging out in the women's house, and the rhythms of his poems coming from the sounds of their weaving. Ordo is the order of the threads. Thackrey here weaves a way through/under complex orders, calling us to order and disorder and finally to immanence. This is a lore poet in her prime."--David Levi Strauss

"Without reference of horizon farther makes navigation by usual instruments, and heroes, impossible. We recognize the image on its cover as sea; we recognize its language as English. Recognition ends there. We are in a funnel descent--a downward circular motion that washes section titles from one another until only the letter O remains. Words also turn into and fall from each other: always compass / encompassing passing / collapsing / as if beauty were complete / not. We fall into the sea of Thackrey's sleight of ear--a straight line of words becomes a spiral, a whole book a circling back. We enter the letter O--lens opening, contraction--the slip space between letters, words, lines, the said, the implied echo. This is how she turns us through the open portal of order's disorder, a history that begins with sundering and ends with shattering--This is how she collapses the compass so that known coordinates disappear, making possible this paean to as if beauty that is infinitely farther."--Susan Gevirtz

"There's an enchantment to these poems. . . . you remind us that we're still humans, very very much so . . . the poems are refreshingly 'contemporary'--in the way, I guess, 'reality' is always so. I mean things profoundly felt are always young. " -- Etel Adnan (personal letter re: Andalusia)

Susan Thackrey, a poet who lives and works in San Francisco, began to compose poetry at the age of three. She was an inaugurating student in the Poetics Program at New College in San Francisco in 1980, and studied with Robert Duncan and Diane di Prima formally and informally over a number of years. Her day jobs have included co- founding and managing the art gallery Thackrey and Robertson in San Francisco, as well as her current work as a Jungian analyst in the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. There she has taught, spoken, and published, focusing especially on art, including publishing a talk and essay on Jung's paintings for The Red Book: Reflections on C.G. Jung's Liber Novus (Routledge, 2013). Her poems have appeared in a number of journals, including Five Fingers, Hambone, Talisman, Traverse, and Volt. Current books in print, in addition to FARTHER, are Empty Gate (Listening Chamber, 1999), GEORGE OPPEN: A RADICAL PRACTICE (O Books and The San Francisco Poetry Center, 2001), and ANDALUSIA (Chax, 2015).