Susannah Lee

Night Shadows IX by Eleanor Goldstein

About

Susannah Lee has worked as a writer, editor, and independent producer for public radio and film. She was a Fulbright Scholar to Portugal in Screenwriting. Her radio features have aired on Monitor Radio, NPR's All Things Considered, Living on Earth, and her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Seneca Review, Sonora Review, Nine Mile Magazine, The Woven Tale, Cloudbank, The North American Review, and others. In 2022 she was invited to join The Arctic Circle residency to sail the Svalbard Archipelago in the High Arctic North. Her recent collection of poetry, Wintering Over is available from Finishing Line Press.

Lee received an MFA in Writing from University of Massachusetts/Amherst, and in Film from Columbia University. She currently lives in rural western Massachusetts.

Publication

Wintering Over by Susannah Lee

To read Wintering Over is, in part, to eavesdrop on the interior voices of contemplatives who speak of what’s singular and sacred: small joys, doubts, daily or seasonal tasks, and the experience of living through the cold dark waiting for light’s benediction. Labor is hard, joys are deep though sometimes fleeting; difficulties may be eased by simple attention, by being “schooled by lichen to seek light in the most meager of places.” In Wintering Over, the Arctic and the vast natural world are a holy presence of which Susannah Lee writes with exquisite and sustaining intricacy (though her humor is discreet and may sneak up on the reader.) This is a taut, particularly beautiful and unique array of poems.

–Jody (Pamela) Stewart, author of This Momentary World, Selected Poems

In Susannah Lee’s Wintering Over, a small group of cloistered nuns sails from Iceland to Norway, to “the fjords who are my cousins.” Facing the “tumbled doing and undoing of tides,” the speaker “sang to the cauled wake behind us, cradling the weight of afterlife.” The canonical hours frame the nuns’ work and prayer: their “cloistered lives lived in a fierce climate” rise out of the page until we enter its three-dimensional space.

Lee plunges us into an arctic winter with “the ice-pilling wool of cloak, waistband, and failure,” where “the hunger moon is brittle.” Throughout the book, darkness, too, is alive. “Night has rolled down on night”; “the moonless moon has turned to embrace the dark” or wanes away into a “slivered moon gone dark.” The nun’s faith, infused with the natural world, takes on a sort of animism. And this world’s beauty also moves another speaker (later in the book and living in a temperate climate) to rejoice in birds who soar in “forked flight”, a world where a “great blue heron carries the air.”

I know of no recent poetry collection that matches Wintering Over for lyricism.

–Deborah Warren, author most recently of Connoisseurs of Worms and Strange to Say: Etymology for Serious Entertainment