Songs of Deliverance by Susan Doble Kaluza

Poet Kevin Young speaks about the necessity of poetry of grief. Susan Doble Kaluza’s elegiac Concrete Wolf Chapbook Award Finalist Songs of Deliverance caught our attention with poems that express the myriad dimensions of loss. From “the struck match-tips of dawn” to “the frivolity of lights strung across the deck” grief invades each season and every hour, inhabits all of nature. Kaluza also relates the quantum quality of loss, “how the substance of things retains, memory, even wood and chalk…” She wisely notes of firefighting, as it is with sorrow and regret, “It’s always when we look back that the fire overtakes us.” These poems are vulnerable, courageous, and deeply moving. Songs of Deliverance is a necessity for every person who has ever mourned.

–Lana Hechtman Ayers, Managing editor of Concrete Wolf and author of The Dead Boy Sings in Heaven