Breathing: American Sonnets, Paperback

The poet Susan Cook has said that, given the mangling done lately to free speech, "form may be coming back", and in her new collection form comes back, in sonnets of great intelligence and beauty. She says "My sonnet's yours America... It is so hard to write you this sonnet." These sonnets are carefully crafted structures, this Breathing, this work is alive and Breathing, pulsing in rhythmic language, stories of power, and pain, Poems. Susan Cook says "Breathing is my common sacrifice, my sustenance, my being, now breathing, mine." and we breath with her, lucky to have these words.

-Gary Lawless, awarded the 2017 Constance H. Carlson Public Humanities Prize by the Maine Humanities Council