BLACK WOOL CAPE
BLACK WOOL CAPE by Alison Carb Sussman begins in Israel but quickly finds itself coursing through childhood, madness, adulthood, and finds a liminal path between the cruel and the innocent. The poetry collection delivers a variety of verse in myriad forms that sing songs of joy, lament, and sorrow.
Poetry/ 978-1-950730-89-6/ August 9, 2022
BLACK WOOL CAPE by Alison Carb Sussman begins in Israel but quickly finds itself coursing through childhood, madness, adulthood, and finds a liminal path between the cruel and the innocent. The poetry collection delivers a variety of verse in myriad forms that sing songs of joy, lament, and sorrow.
Poetry/ 978-1-950730-89-6/ August 9, 2022
BLACK WOOL CAPE by Alison Carb Sussman begins in Israel but quickly finds itself coursing through childhood, madness, adulthood, and finds a liminal path between the cruel and the innocent. The poetry collection delivers a variety of verse in myriad forms that sing songs of joy, lament, and sorrow.
Poetry/ 978-1-950730-89-6/ August 9, 2022
Praise for BLACK WOOL CAPE
Spanning decades, narrative or imagistic, these are passionately honest poems of perfect iambic meter. Whether they focus on the anxiety of transient life in a Kibbutz, the tribulations and heartbreak of a young girl 'a stranger in her own body, ' or with family trepidations and angst or with adult longings and fears or with love and love's sorrows or with the vulnerabilities and distresses in marriage, we are constantly and richly reassured by the confidence inherent in Alison Carb Sussman's very sensitive and durable poems.
—Clarence Major
The poems in Black Wool Cape oscillate between the innocent and the brutal, between the personal, sometimes surreal moment and the cool, detached journalist's report. These poems give us an Emersonian, wandering-eye-perspective on the layers of human experience, from the political down to the excruciating, immediate sensation, and this dance between the personal and the political, the adult perspective and the child's observance, shifts and turns throughout this collection like an inspector's examination of a crime scene. Alison Carb Sussman's book shall take a rightful place among poetry of witness."
—Douglas Cole, winner of the Leslie Hunt Memorial Prize for poetry and author of the novel The White Field and the poetry books The Blue Island and The Gold Tooth in the Crooked Smile of God.
Alison Carb Sussman is a truth-teller, whether she is singing in the voice of an Israeli soldier, or in the voice of her younger self facing family cruelty. Her lines bear righteous anger subtly--and transport joy in the small details of a life mapped out with immaculate craft. "In my heart memories rock..." the narrator says and now those memories cradle the reader in lines and phrases that won't drop us, won't let us down.
—Marilyn Kallet is the author or editor of 18 books, including seven volumes of lyric poetry and translations of poets Paul Eluard and Benjamin Péret. She recently served as Knoxville Poet Laureate and is Professor Emerita at the University of Tennessee.
About ALISON CARB SUSSMAN
Alison Carb Sussman, a 2015 Pushcart Prize nominee, has garnered numerous awards and publications throughout her writing career. Her chapbook, On the Edge, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2013. Sussman won the Abroad Writers' Conference/Finishing Line Press Authors Poetry Contest and read her winning poems as their guest in Dublin, Ireland in 2015. Her poem "Dirty'' was a finalist in Naugatuck River Review's 11th Annual Narrative Poetry Contest in 2019. Her poem "Anhedonia'' (now ''Anhedonic Woman") was a finalist in the 49th Parallel Award for Poetry in Bellingham Review's 2016 Literary Contests. Her poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, Cutthroat: A journal of the Arts, Gargoyle, The New York Times, Rattle, Southword, and other publications. She lives and writes in New York City.
