Weight of Light is precise and questioning. Smallen's attention to the smallest details reveals deep passion behind her quiet watchfulness. The wisdom resulting from Smallen’s practiced sight is perhaps what makes this book so compelling. Each poem is a microcosm of a larger truth. In Smallen’s search for meaning we see that everything in the universe moves—even the inanimate and the dead. Algebra, physics, dance, spirituality, and art are all included, and behind these subjects, a clock is ticking. Remarkably, there is peacefulness in her acceptance of the transitory world—even in her knowledge of the inevitability of grief.

Weight Of Light

Literature & Fiction

Smallen, Su

History & Criticism

Laurel Poetry Collective

"Smallen deftly uses the heartbreaking power of plain language to allow the hard fact of loss to intrude upon her lovely meditations....Over the course of the book, Smallen transforms snow from a metaphor for loss to a 'mythology of joy,'" Minneapolis Star Tribune. Literal and imaginary classifications of snow lyrically delineate and frame poems about presence, memory, erasure, making, and meaning. Four of the poems in this collection have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and ten have been anthologized. As Alison Hawthorne Deming notes, "Smallen writes with resonant clarity . . . work that beautifully marries attention and evanescence."

Kinds of Snow: Poems

Poetry

Green Writers Press

You This Close is a rippling work encompassing love and water, longing and the natural world. Su Smallen wrote these poems during a residency with the St. Croix Watershed Research Station, where she learned about aquifers and diatoms from the scientists there, kindred in their curiosity about the elegant ways nature works. With imagery from the river and its creatures, the poems of You This Close are linked together with the last line of one becoming the first line of the next, making a structure that matches a kind of diatom chain. The poems are also about hope for love, addressing a beloved not yet met.

You This Close

Red Dragonfly Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Smallen, Su. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Smallen, Su