Description
In Pilgrim Drag
by Susan M. G. Dingle
$14.99, paper
978-1-64662-292-4
2020
Susan M. G. Dingle (formerly known as Susan Grathwohl) received an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Between 1971-1976, her poetry was published in APR, the Ohio Review, Partisan Review, Feminist Studies and elsewhere, and in For Neruda, For Chile, an anthology edited by Walter Lowenfels (Beacon Press, 1976). In 2013, she resumed publication as Susan Dingle in The Poetry of Well-Being, with Maggie Bloomfield and Nina Yavel. Her poems have since appeared in Fifth Wednesday Journal, and several anthologies with Local Gems. She has featured at readings throughout Long Island. In 2014, with Robert A. “Bubbie” Brown, Susan started and hosted Poetry Street at the Blue Duck Bakery Café in Riverhead. In 2016, in collaboration with Maggie Bloomfield, she wrote, produced and performed Break Out!, a two-woman show about recovery told in poetry, at the Southampton Cultural Center in 2016, and at the East End Fringe Festival in Riverhead in 2017. In 2017 Susan received the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Meritorious Award from First Baptist Church of Riverhead. She is currently in the M.Div. Program at New Brunswick Theological Seminary, and preaches throughout Long Island, a testimony to God’s amazing grace. Parting Gifts, her first collection, was published by Local Gems in 2019. See also www.ourpoetrystreet.com, and www.susandingle.com.
Caroline DeLuca –
In Pilgrim Drag deftly explores America’s deep and murky moral swamp, speaking truth to power without ever flinching away from interrogating the speaker’s own white privilege and inevitable complicity in that power. With clear narrative and a keen sense of the absurd, Dingle guides the reader on a pilgrimage through grief both personal and political. Her poems offer no outs from walking through the fire, but offer wry, eloquent camaraderie in the heat.
Doug Fambrough –
“In Pilgrim Drag” is another deeply thoughtful set of poems from the poetess who grabbed my attention with her previous work, “Parting Gifts”. Her new work focuses on issues of race and spirituality. She explores these issues with the wisdom she gained from years of struggle, coming to a place from which she must share with others. The word images, she crafts with wit, brevity, and skill, will surely bring each reader’s lifetime of experiences back to mind for careful reflection and thereby offer opportunity for a more mindful future. There is true value here.
Miranda Beeson (verified owner) –
“In poetry is sanctuary / for things I cannot say.” writes Susan Dingle in IN PILGRIM DRAG. Smocked in white, Dingle bears witness to issues of race, disenfranchisement & rage in words that fly off the page — as memory [reframed], as “stubborn prayers,” in “festivities of grief.”
In “Psalm with No Apology” Dingle observes “a sign that says SLOW DOWN.” Dingle’s words however, never slow down, but rush head long towards revelation and perhaps, for all of us who read, some kind of restitution. A psalm in itself.