It’s Over by Susan Wolbarst

Name: It's Over by Susan Wolbarst
SKU: 140764
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Original price was: $17.99.Current price is: $15.99.

These soulful, beautifully wrought poems offer us so many gifts–elegy chief among them, but also wit and everyday joys and often, surprise. In Wolbarst’s hands, poetic remembering is an act of love committed amid unknown perils, and the results are moving and powerful.

–Naomi J. Williams, author of Landfalls

Susan Wolbarst’s first book of poetry, It’s Over, is a wonderful read. Through the years I have enjoyed each time she reads a new poem. Each one tells a story made vivid with her reporter’s eye for details. Somehow even the ordinary becomes extraordinary. In “Swinging,” the first poem I remember seeing of hers, she shows us four sisters on a porch swing telling their wishes. Wolbarst also delights me with the tale of her mother, who loves being a badass in the nursing home. She brings us with her as she imagines the thoughts of a young man who has jumped from Golden Gate Bridge but is saved by a sea lion (“After”) and as she searches the faces of three convicted murderers to see if there is something she can detect that makes them different. There is something deeply human in her poems that speaks to the wonder of being alive in spite of all the griefs we need to bear. I’m grateful to have them gathered in this book.

–Allegra Jostad Silberstein,Poet Laureate Emerita for Davis, CA

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It’s Over

by Susan Wolbarst

Paper

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This title will be released on August 29, 2025

It’s Over is a series of haunting poems powered by bare-boned immediate feeling. The narrative structure of the poems connects readers to the intensity of each moment, whether the subject matter is a naked woman running through the streets of Nazi-occupied Poland, the survivor of a suicidal jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, a mother who loves being a badass, or drinking beer in Mexico during the predictable daily downpour. The poems are propelled forward without any sense of artifice or pretense. Self-irony and understated lyricism are interspersed with evocative epiphanies, expressed in simple and direct language. #poetry #history #suicide #humanity #life #humor

Susan Wolbarst has worked at many jobs – including a one-day stint on the Pacific Coast Stock Exchange – and been especially drawn to jobs putting words on a page, such as working at small-town newspapers. She currently lives in rural Gualala, California, where she works as a reporter for the local (print!) weekly newspaper. When she’s not writing news stories, she writes poetry as well as various flavors of prose. Her poetry has been published in Plainsongs, thewildword.com, pioneertownlit.com, Third Street Review and others. Five of her poems were published in a recent Canadian anthology, Alchemy and Miracles, nature woven into words, edited by Cassandra Arnold. Susan won second place in California State Poetry Society’s 2022 and 2023 annual contests. She has an MA in fine art from California State University, Sacramento and a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She published a cookbook in 1992: Tasting Gold, A goldmine of recipes from Nevada County’s best restaurants. When she’s not reading, writing, or cooking, she enjoys travel, walking on the beach and messing around in kayaks.