Keep and Give Away by Susan Meyers, Terrance Hayes (Foreword by)

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Synopsis

Keep and Give Away was selected by Terrance Hayes as the inaugural winner of the South Carolina Poetry Book Prize sponsored by the South Carolina Poetry Initiative.

In her first full-length collection, Susan Meyers guides us through her examination of life’s ordinary moments and the seemingly ordinary images that abide in them to reveal the extraordinary. From minutia to marriage, crumbs to crows, nothing is too commonplace to escape her attention as she traverses terrains of childhood, loss, relationships, and death. Mostly lyrical and often elegiac, the poems of Keep and Give Away move along the rifts between the past and present, the lived and desired. The dominant emotions of the verses are deepened by observations rooted in our natural world. In the book’s final section, marriage poems turn to fishing and gardening for their truths, contemplations that recognize the realities of a world governed by luck, imperfection, contraries, and-most of all-love.

author of Off-Season in the Promised Land - Peter Makuck

"The images in Keep and Give Away are striking and resonate with the book’s central paradox of loving and letting go. . . . This is a first collection full of finely crafted poems-free verse and poems in form-that are alive and radiantly detailed, pleasurable and poignant."

Biography

Susan Meyers is the author of Lessons in Leaving, a chapbook selected by Brendan Galvin for the 1998 Persephone Press Book Award. Her poems have appeared in the Southern Review, Crazyhorse, and Tar River Poetry and have been featured online at Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. A longtime writing instructor, she holds an M.F.A. from Queens University of Charlotte. Meyers grew up in North Carolina and currently lives near Summerville, South Carolina.