Provincelands by Maxine Susman

Maxine Susman‘s Provincelands is, at its core, a book about looking so hard at something that it seems to disappear into the heart. The focus here, then, is laser and the world being seen is brought in with great tenderness, humor and authenticity. These poems reminded me again and again why this piece of earth is so important to artists and why beauty is also a kind of loneliness.

–Michael Klein, author of When I Was a Twin

In the final poem of Provincelands, Maxine Susman‘s beautifully structured chapbook, as the speaker crafts her self-portrait, she quotes her photography teacher: “He says, Find your places / and know them well. Return over and over. / They’re never the same. . . . As she “improvises” her late-in-life second marriage, she writes, “I’m learning adjustments, light calibrated through a shifting lens.” These closely observed, lyrical poems return to the landscape she has made hers: “Full-tide at dawn, beach with thunderheads, marsh / oozing to half tide, fiddler crabs, hefting their tools.” What powerful music Susman draws from monosyllables, from dune and tide, crab and clam, marsh, muck, mouth and valve, nub, pod, and bone. This is a music of essences, essentials. Provincelands is a book you can read straight through, at one sitting, then return to-over and over.

–Judith Rowe Michaels, author of Ghost Notes