Hand Me Down by Susan Elizabeth Sweeney

Susan Elizabeth Sweeney‘s first book introduces us to a sensibility that has long been wise to the world. Where has she been? Or perhaps the question is: where have we been? A grateful readership is bound to spring up for a poet of such pathos and wit.

Sweeney presents to us the simplest and most familiar experiences with the overarching perspectives of high art. Family memory, some of it tragedy, is honored and transformed by the most beautifully crafted and sonorous poems on little things: a box of “safety” matches; a little red Samsonite suitcase; bookmarks; a breakfast orange. Here is a poet to read and re-read; here is a poet whose work to come can only be eagerly awaited.

–Mary Jo Salter, author of A Phone Call to the Future: New and Selected Poems, and co-editor of The Norton Anthology of Poetry

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]

Hand Me Down: in the title poem, those three words are hyphenated and refer to a dress passed down from a sister who has committed suicide to the living sister who speaks in these poems; but, without the hyphens, the title of the book becomes an imperative, the book itself demanding to be handed down, something for her family and others, like Emily Dickinson’s “Ebon Box” (from the book’s epigraph) to “reverently peer” into as we, too, try to make sense of the past.

Susan Elizabeth Sweeney’s word play, her sense of how the formal properties of poems can be both a source of secrets and a means of grace, and, most of all, her fierce sense that “things that were still matter” drive this carefully orchestrated, intelligent, and moving chapbook. Sweeney achieves, as Yeats said poets should, that highly stitched poem that never shows its stitches. Her skill, both in and out of form, her deferential wit, and a wildness that is touchingly wedded to propriety, transform those melancholy hurts that lie at the center of our existence into story and art.

–Robert Cording, author of Walking with Ruskin

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]

Imagine Emily Dickinson climbing out a childhood window to find herself alive and here today, and you will have a vantage point from which to read these startlingly poised and heartfelt poems, so finely made, so powerful in their facility to name this sad and beautiful place. We all have to climb out that window, sometimes with great difficulty, past our parents, wordless and worrying and always, always present, and to climb as well past unspeakable hurts, written of here with incredible courage and control.

–John Hodgen, author of Heaven & Earth Holding Company

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]