Everything is a Big Deal for an Ocean by Susan Bruce

Susan Bruce has written a contemporary voice for the voice of waves: humorous, besieged, beseeching. One wave is known as “the comedian of icy coldness”; one lets off steam “and ejaculates more waves”; another aspires “to be a skyscraper”; Everything Is a Big Deal for an Ocean is an elliptical dadaist re-invention of the life and times of waves, here perceived as individual entities with fears, wit, and desires of their own. Bruce has given waves both individual and multiple consciousness, inviting us to reconsider our love and fear of this force of nature. I couldn’t help but think of JMW Turner’s magisterial paintings: what if those waves could talk! Here we overhear the absolutely unpredictable, wholly original conversation between a writer in the sands and the insouciant waves.
–Catherine Barnett, author of Human Hours

Everything is a big deal, especially when you are an ocean full of waves. Bruce’s collection of poems in Everything is a Big Deal for an Ocean inhabits the spirit of being a wave, and a person and a waveperson. The poet is wave, and the wave is a poet who crashes and softens in the spirit of As a wave artist I sprinkle cells of splash. These poems are the power of splash, the sweetness of splash, the inside of a wave and the outside of a wave, a singular vision of the sea in all of its humanity. Everything is a huge deal, a monumental occasion that Bruce has written about through the lens of a wave that is never ending, the embattled and beautiful energy of everyday existence.
–Matthew Lippman, author of We Are All Sleeping with Our Sneakers On

What a surprising, witty, sensual, playful and compelling sequence of poems Susan Bruce has made. What a mind this ocean is—fluid, hypnotic—with its deeply improvisatory logic, its incessant questions, confessions, repetitions; its waves of thought and sinking feelings, its blues and cluttered ribcage. With a light touch and rhythmic beauty, a Yes, and process of investigation, Bruce explores our contradictions and compulsions, our fears and psychic undertows, in a moving lyric meditation on order and disorder.
–Donna Masini, author of 4:30 Movie

Everything Is a Big Deal for An Ocean is like standing on the shore, eavesdropping on an incredibly personal conversation between the narrator and the ocean. We’re lulled, then tossed by the sway of the waves, feel the grit of the sand between our toes, and hear the “growl and burst” resonating our ears. Who is speaking and whether the questions posed will ever be answered mirror the fluid, enigmatic nature of the water itself. In this dialogue, Bruce illuminates both the vast expanse of the ocean as well as the depths of our own internal worlds.
–Heather Aimee O’Neill, author of Memory Future and Obliterations

In Everything is a Big Deal for an Ocean, Susan Bruce connects the world of the writer, and the role of the writer, to that of the natural world. “We could be blissful together.” “I’m left to sing when the sun rises and sing when the sun sets.” That’s the call of the artist, isn’t it? To sing! The beauty of poetry is how we use it to be resilient. These poems make us think and help us to carry on, naturally, as a wave.
–Leah Umansky, author of Of Tyrant (2024)