Some Unsayable Blue by Susan Sample

The sequence of elegies in Susan Sample’s Some Unsayable Blue both perform and examine the work of mourning, all in language dense with specificity, and luminous as they trace particle and wave of the mourner’s sensibilities. “I’m seated in the emergency exit row,” the speaker says of her travels to be at her father’s side. It’s a double journey, toward her father’s, but also her own, death, a knowledge we observe and take part in as the poems piece together their rituals of care. “I can’t, don’t want to / Ever leave, leave,” the poet says, and these poems give us all of life’s radiance, made all the more precious by the inevitability of its end.  

–Lisa Bickmore, Author of Ephemerist.

Susan Sample‘s collection of poems has at its center a mind that makes sense of the unfathomable–and a voice that sings the unsayable. Integrating science with detailed experiences of a father’s final years and death makes the poems precise, but it’s the “exhilarating radiance” of the poet’s gift that drives the poems, compelling us to read and reread them. I wish this book for everyone facing the loss of a parent.

—Natasha Saje, Author of Vivarium

Some Unsayable Blue is a book that examines the uncertain line between death and life, in particular our lack of language to adequately describe what it means to experience the death of a loved one, and to revel in the joy of our own continuing life in the presence of that death. In tender, spare, unsentimental poems, Sample tests out a language of her own to mourn and document the death of her father, and to probe the bureaucratic and medical languages we use to frame the loss of an aging parent. Some Unsayable Blue is a timely and beautiful book, as well as a philosophical one, moving the reader past euphemism and despair to a more vibrant, lasting, and human wisdom.

—Paisley Rekdal, Author of Imaginary Vessels