Living the Outskirts by Susan E. Hamilton

In Living the Outskirts, Susan E. Hamilton tells the story of a once prosperous logging town now languishing, delivering her tale with wit and aplomb. The writing is so lucid that we feel we could map her hometown of Shelton, Washington: there, the Babe Blue Ox Theater (named after Paul Bunyan’s prize ox); there, the Batstone Funeral Home, there, the county dump, where the detritus of living can be alternately relinquished and reclaimed. Hamilton allows us the guilty pleasure of bursts of nostalgia, but never for long, as she moves from childhood into somewhat haunted young womanhood. Her protagonist learns that the eyes of the special needs children at Roger’s School burn most brightly, and that movement, whether it be the centrifugal spinning of a playground merry-go-round or the wavering lines of a pool during a flummoxed lifesaving class, signals the need for flight. And it’s in the act of leaving that the poet “takes the space as [her] own.”

 –Dave Karp

Throughout the poems in Susan E. Hamilton’s Living the Outskirts, memory calls like the “3-short / 1-long blast” of Mom’s whistle—inescapable, tender, complicated, strange—and personal history is inseparable from the entanglement of place, rooted in the lived details of the collapsing logging town of Shelton, Washington where the speaker grew up. Though “Nostalgia bleeds like a postmark,” these unsentimental poems dig with careful attention through the personal and collective midden, unearthing treasures and sorrows. Amidst the dross and humus, the poems find nourishment too, sour pie cherries and lobster mushrooms, wild strawberries and take-out, the world’s tiniest, saddest sundae. And there is a pervasive generosity toward life, especially toward the under-sung or unprotected: the poems will always side with the snakes, rats, and bees. In this way we gather how a self can grow: we are our past and the place we first rooted, but that doesn’t mean we are doomed to be a Weeping Fir Tree. Framing and threaded through the collection are ekphrastic poems that offer an additional lens: perhaps it is through connecting to art—and the art of the poems themselves—that a path forward is possible.

–Sierra Nelson