Suddenly Deciduous by Dee Slavutin

The poems in Dee Slavutin’s beautiful collection, Suddenly Deciduous, crackle with energy and resolve. These poems center on love in all its many forms—parents, children, lovers, animals—and do so in a way that is unflinchingly honest with its subjects, with the reader, and with the speaker herself. The sacredness and the messiness of life are everywhere in this book, making it one to return to again and again, as our own lives carry on.

–Lynn Melnick,Poet, former fellow  at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, poetry teacher Columbia University and Princeton University, Author of Refusenik, a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award (2022)

Dee Slavutin’s Suddenly Deciduous should be savored, like the martini olive that she writes about in this poetry collection.

Dee examines, and employs, the little things like a fly, mosquito, ant, daddy long-legs, bee, etc. and showcases them in poems, as in “The Mosquito Bite,” “I Thought I had a Bad Night,” “2:30am,” “Polyester Never Dies,” and “Today, I’ll Stay Still”. She expertly transforms these “little things” into metaphors for the larger elements in life, such as motherhood, love, age, loneliness, dread, etc.

She creates multi-hued pieces, allowing us to piece together the mosaic of her life and craft. She weaves for us a richly designed tapestry with skillfully selected words that she, the artist, lays proudly before us between the covers of this exquisite book, Suddenly Deciduous.

–Dr. Tammy Nuzzo-Morgan, Suffolk County Poet Laureate 2009-2011, 2017 WWB Long Island Poet of the Year, Editor of Wyld Syde Press, President of LIP&LR

Take refuge in the generous canopy in Dee Slavutin’s second collection “Suddenly Deciduous” which captures poems of nature to poems about marriage. The speaker yearns for romance which has been replaced by domesticity. “I make dinner, you take out the trash”, her mother’s dying, “three 100 hour morphine bags.” With sharp images of aging, there is quiet disillusionment and acceptance. She invites her reader to take a journey in these poems that quickly get to the point with little fanfare, evocative language, and honest spirit.

–Carole Stone Author of 5 poetry books, Distinguished Professor of English, Emerita at Montclair State University, fellowships from New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University, England