Sugar on the Floor (Paperback or Softback)

Original poems by Susan Gubernat, winner of John Ridland Poetry Prize.

Susan Gubernat is a synergistic shapeshifting poet who circumvents background noise to focus on life, the universe, and the deeper, richer totality of all living things. Sometimes Neruda, Plath, or Eurydice. Sometimes a toad, an owl, an elegy. But more often music, France, an odyssey. This is a spectacular poet who really loves to dance and rock.

-Richard Peabody, editor/publisher Gargoyle Magazine

Susan Gubernat's Sugar on the Floor is paced as mindfully as a walk through a sculpture garden, measuring monuments to memory and change. The poet's acute vision considers our distance from these dignified shapings of experience, our acceptance or rejection and the phases of nuanced understanding in between. We might stand outside, listening, knowing what women know, about women, and artists, those who live life carefully, or we might hear the roar of the unjust crowd cheering the death of the bull and wish for the reversal that lust brings to eternity.

-Lisa Lewis, author of Present and Future Storm

These poems are a triumph of craft, with a voice ranging seamlessly from observations of nature to mythology to metaphysics to love in all its aspects. Gubernat's images stun with their precision: the "choreography of the praying mantis"; a cheek's "emery roughness"; pomegranate juice "vampiring / down our arms"; three doves "round as putty." The poems bear witness to a life fully embraced, from childhood on, with no shrinking from its pain or loss and with a bracingly honest account of its joys. The title comes from the poem "Like Sugar on the Floor," which ends, "And hooked as we are, we come back for more." You'll get hooked on these poems, and you'll keep coming back for more.

-Lynne Knight, author of The Language of Forgetting