Susie Berg: All This Blood

All This Blood is the second full-length collection from Susie Berg. Her first book, How to Get Over Yourself (2013) was also published by Piquant Press.

Her work has appeared in such journals as carte blanche, ArsMedica, and Understorey, and in the anthologies Desperately Seeking Susans, The Mom Egg Review, and Body and Soul.

Her chapbooks include Awaiting Butterflies from words(on)pages press, and You Will Still Have Birds: A Conversation in Poetry with Elana Wolff, from Lyrical Myrical Press.

Susie Berg is also the former co-curator of Toronto’s Plasticine Poetry reading series.

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REVIEWS of ALL This Blood:

These centos, imitations, and found poems scavenge truths by lift-ing telling phrases overheard in cafes and bars, glimpsed on Face-book, or recalled from childhood and adult encounters. They are at turns heart-wrenching, painful, and humorous. From the poet Ellen Bass, Susie Berg has learned the art of the heart-twist and how to reveal underlying anxieties, the deeper currents in the blood that flow beneath our dailiness. Even as she resists easy conclusions — “I won’t untwist the bottle of memory / name all these shades of longing” — Berg delivers an unsettling yet cohe-sive collection. With calm assurance and vivid detail, these poems take on the moments when blood emerges into the light, blurring “the distance between true and / what we believe.”

Kateri Lanthier

Susie Berg’s All This Blood burns brilliantly with arresting senso-rial language and images steeped in life’s great unfolding and memorable moments. Berg’s well-crafted potent lines are salient, and reaffirm these diurnal instances ushering in the cogent under-standing recollection brings. All This Blood folds us into Berg’s cyclic experiences, and we instantly see and feel the dynamic wonder of common humanity on display. Her reminiscence is our retrospection, or as Berg says herself, “history is the reason / I lead you to the edge.”

Michael Fraser