Storage Issues

According to Albert Goldbarth, Author, To Be Read in 500 Years and many more poetry collections; two-time winner, National Book Critics Circle award, "The 'slim striped dirt-colored frog / in the first flush of deadnetle, milweed / and bindweed unmaking the hollyhock bed" might be Annie Dillard by way of Gerard Manley Hopins . . . but in fact it's Suzanne Kay Miller, whose poem-document on life lived both in and away from a Mennonite community proves to us over and over how 'You might imagine eternity / in local terms, ' the mandate of so much moving poetry, and the lovely presiding spirit of her own." Darcy A. Zabel, Professor of English, Friends University, says that "Pop psychologists call it baggage-the memories, the feelings, both happy and sad, that stick with us, and haunt us, but author Suzanne Miller rightly observes that really, it's storage issues-how much room do you have in a life for happiness, for joy, for love and for the pain that sometimes comes with great love and loss?" Raylene Hinz-Penner, Author, Searching for Sacred Ground: The Journey of Chief Lawrence Hart, Mennonite, observes, "'To live as an island in a sea of wickeness, even with God, leaves one dry.' Empathizing here with the thirst of Noah, Miller explores that 'dryness' that is the human plight, especially the generations of woman-pain: mothering, a husband's betrayals, brokenness, like that of the trees. The poet's voice reminds me, when it breaks into praise, of Hopkins in its formality-and sometimes, in its disappointment with the world, as anguished as a Sexton or a Plath."