Born in Rochester, NY, Susan Dworski Nusbaum received her BA from Smith College and JD from the University of Buffalo Law School. She lives in Buffalo, NY where she raised her family, worked as a musician, teacher, arts administrator, and most recently, as an attorney. Her poetry collections, What We Take With Us, Open Wide, the Eye, and Alive in This Place, were released in 2014, 2016, and 2019. (Coffeetown Press). Her fourth poetry collection, This Uncertain Voyage, was released in February, 2024 (Coffeetown Press.) Her work has appeared in numerous publications including The Connecticut River Review, Poetry East, Woven Tale Press, Nimrod International Journal, Chautauqua Literary Journal, Calliope, Chautauqua, Harpur Palate, Wisconsin Review, The Woven Tale Press, The Sow’s Ear: A Celebration of Western New York Poets, (2014), and The Buffalo News. She has presented her work in solo public readings in several communities in the Northeast and Florida.
PRAISE:
We often think of sign language as the art of translating words and emotions into physical gestures. Susan Nusbaum’s superb book, Sign Language, translates the gestures and emotions,even the political realities of ordinary life, into lines of poetry. Whether focusing on the reaction of a teenage boy after a devastating housefire, “as he picks through the silent bones of his childhood” or describing the late October silence when “no sparrows spill their chatter within this space,” Nusbaum’s eyes and ears are always open and her pen ready to describe what it is to be human in the world, ready to find the messages beneath the words. In often plainspoken language her consistently eloquent poems are like the pfannkuchen pan she finds after her mother’s death in her poem “Ashes”—something seemingly ordinary that has been “scoured to brilliance.”
–Fred Zirm, author of Cycling at Sunrise, Object Lessons
Susan Nusbaum’s newest book, Sign Language, looks at the ways natural phenomena, chance encounters, found objects, and persistent memories all contain signs, some subtle, like pale seed pods fluttering from limbs like confetti, and some blatant, a literal sign promising Jake’s Steak House and Tavern will/ be erected here, maybe tomorrow.
These poems elevate the ordinary, demonstrating that the most ephemeral moments can be signs of something lasting and significant, Nusbaum marvels at an intricate tracery of ice crystals but discovers, “The next morning— no trace/ as if the web had unraveled/ dissolved into the swirl of the universe/ Such radiance, ours/ for an instant.” A teenage boy finds a family heirloom while picking through the remnants of his home after a devastating fire. “Cradling the teacup in his hands/ he offers it to the camera/ blows away a veil of ash.” She views a golden locust tree “gazing, not from a distance/ but centered inside a room of mirrors/ finding your reflection flickering around you/ a thousand oval flames against the blue.”
The most poignant poems are portraits of people, an opera exchange student, a Holocaust survivor, an old friend who knows about birds. These people aren’t famous, but they’re extraordinary and they too are signs of something beautiful and resilient in the human spirit. The last three poems describe actual, physical signs: an electronic billboard with an enigmatic message, a sign reading “Open Soon” on a tavern that never opens, and a poster reading “Free Hugs” held aloft by villagers offering community and support to voters bereaved by the outcome of the 2024 election. This is Nusbaum’s fifth collection and the distillation of years spent refining lines and language into small treasures that speak to the mystery at the core of our mundane lives. She teaches us that, although our experiences may be common, even humorous, they’re never trivial.
–Patricia Averbach, author of Dreams of Drowning, Missing Persons
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