I Will Meet You at the River by Suzannah Gilman

I Will Meet You at the River traces the slow, miraculous coming into being of love. Anyone fortunate enough to have loved like this will remember the sense of wonder and disbelief that touches each of these poems. Passionate, wise, and funny, this lovely debut collection reminds us that the familiar world at any moment can ambush us with ecstasy.

–George Bilgere, Author of The White Museum

The elegant poems in I Will Meet You at the River begin in pain and end in hope. The images are precise. The trouble that attaches to them bridges the vastness that separates Paris from St. Paul, or lemon peels from Latvia. For all their keenness of insight and all their beauty, what these poems offer most of all is pleasure.

–Kyle Minor, author of In the Devil’s Territory

In Suzannah Gilman’s desire-soaked lyrics, the natural world—a “watery sky,” the “tones of jays,” or “the hanging scent of fallen leaves”—manifests itself in a sensory swirl, though so gem-like are these images they lose nothing in clarity. When heartbreak, desire’s shadow, sets in, and “the gardener knows / something has got to give,” Gilman’s marvel at the wondrous textures of the world still prevails. To dig as this collection does into the “marriage between / root and earth” is to risk a few blisters, but oh! those blisters “break open and bleed” like flowers.

–Julie Sheehan, winner of the Whiting Award for Poetry

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]