SONGS OF ARCHILOCHUS
Riding atop grief’s didactic waves, Rancourt skillfully writes in a variety of poetic forms that support the intimate melding of shared experience as healer, elder, and human being. Prose, lyric, ballad, couplets, and haiku inspired – Rancourt continues to push the boundaries of trauma. Songs of Archilochus is an odyssey of soul recovery over great distances, time, and place: a migration from moral injury to a momentary place of peace. It takes courage to age with grace. It takes courage to sing the songs that we have been given - but sing we must for that is how the healing is carried – that is how the stories take shape – how they become a part of history whether personal, societal, global, or Universal. Songs of Archilochus reminds us that the vibration of human life knows no border, boundary, box or cage. Warrior. Poet. Lovers. Sing.
Poetry
ISBN: 978-1956692983
Publication Date: October 10, 2023
Riding atop grief’s didactic waves, Rancourt skillfully writes in a variety of poetic forms that support the intimate melding of shared experience as healer, elder, and human being. Prose, lyric, ballad, couplets, and haiku inspired – Rancourt continues to push the boundaries of trauma. Songs of Archilochus is an odyssey of soul recovery over great distances, time, and place: a migration from moral injury to a momentary place of peace. It takes courage to age with grace. It takes courage to sing the songs that we have been given - but sing we must for that is how the healing is carried – that is how the stories take shape – how they become a part of history whether personal, societal, global, or Universal. Songs of Archilochus reminds us that the vibration of human life knows no border, boundary, box or cage. Warrior. Poet. Lovers. Sing.
Poetry
ISBN: 978-1956692983
Publication Date: October 10, 2023
Riding atop grief’s didactic waves, Rancourt skillfully writes in a variety of poetic forms that support the intimate melding of shared experience as healer, elder, and human being. Prose, lyric, ballad, couplets, and haiku inspired – Rancourt continues to push the boundaries of trauma. Songs of Archilochus is an odyssey of soul recovery over great distances, time, and place: a migration from moral injury to a momentary place of peace. It takes courage to age with grace. It takes courage to sing the songs that we have been given - but sing we must for that is how the healing is carried – that is how the stories take shape – how they become a part of history whether personal, societal, global, or Universal. Songs of Archilochus reminds us that the vibration of human life knows no border, boundary, box or cage. Warrior. Poet. Lovers. Sing.
Poetry
ISBN: 978-1956692983
Publication Date: October 10, 2023
Praise for SONGS OF ARCHILOCHUS
In this collection Rancourt’s poems are a highly energized synthesis that pulls images from the many chambers of her life—a woman marine, a journalist, ambulance crew member. She is able to weave soul with the technical language of this or that employment with grace. “All/but the occasional high intensity lumen clusters, say,/of facility-housing-child-prisoners & various/violence of aborted humanity, are all beacons that Fanta/as sticky spill down your street, into your house,/your church, your lungs, because a round of pepper spray,/a couple of cans of tear gas/& rubber bullets can be like that…” The driving heart of these poems will invite you to take a walk with her. Her ability to mix disparate elements and make them cohere in imagination is remarkable.
—Doug Anderson, VN Veteran, Pushcart Prize winner, author of: Undress, She Said; Horse Medicine; Bamboo Bridge; The Moon Reflected Fire; Blues for Unemployed Secret Police; Keep Your Head Down: Vietnam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doug_Anderson_(poet)
Rancourt's words are earthy and intimate—like morning conversation between old friends, clear-eyed with the sorrows of shared experience, still hopeful for the future. Wherever she goes in her poems, she offers gifts of nature and spirit and grit. ‘Archilochus’ is an ambush, but the hummingbird lives.
—Randy Brown poetry editor, As You Were journal and author of FOB Haiku: War Poems from Inside the Wire
In Songs of Archilochus, a lyrical storm that marries sky and Earth and memory and presence, Rancourt’s voice vibrates across the landscape of body, ‘to cleanse the palette, to rinse earthly vulgarities/ spoken in abjection while present in the wandering.’ These poems are political and spiritual protests, inverted depictions of absence and passion and ephemera. Through powerful meditation and unexpected metaphor, Rancourt writes vertically, forces us to ask ourselves, ‘What is it – finally – that needs to be said?’
—Tara Stillions Whitehead, author of The Year of the Monster and They More Than Burned
About SUZANNE S. RANCOURT
Suzanne S. Rancourt – a poet / author / of Abenaki / Huron, Quebecois & Scottish descent – is a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps and U.S. Army. Her books include Songs of Archilochus (Unsolicited Press, 2023); Old Stones, New Roads (Main Street Rag, 2021); murmurs at the gate (Unsolicited Press, 2019), winner of the 2023 Poetry of Modern Conflict Award; Billboard in the Clouds (Curbstone Books, 2004), awarded the Native Writers First Book Award. Rancourt was the May 2022 / 2023 guest artist at the University of Michigan's New England Literature Program. She has also been the featured writer for the Sundog Poetry Center's VT event honoring the People of the Dawnland: Voices of Today and Tomorrow. Her poetry, non-fiction, and fiction have appeared in a host of journals and magazines, including The Massachusetts Review, The Brooklyn Review, River Heron Review, Tupelo Press Native Voices Anthology, Bright Hill Press 25th Anniversary Anthology, Muddy River Poetry Review, Ginosko, Journal of Military Experience, and Callaloo. Suzanne is also a multi-modal Expressive Arts Therapist with degrees in psychology, writing, Credentialed Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Counselor, Aikido and Iaido.
