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Frangible Operas (Gunpowder Press, 2024)
“‘Tonight the bells of the flowers ring out,’ begins the title poem in Susan Kelly-DeWitt’s exquisite new collection, and you will want to stop and listen. Frangible Operas is a book of honed astonishments. I love the way each line pays attention and makes you attend, the way each poem lets you breathe before its ending takes away your breath. When Kelly-DeWitt describes a woman’s arms in a painting by Raphael as forming ‘a perfect basketry,’ she might as well be describing her own poems and the impeccably artful way they contain whole worlds.”
— Susan Cohen, author of Democracy of Fire
“The diversity of forms and subjects in Susan Kelly-DeWitt’s Frangible Operas is breathtaking. With grace, precision, insight, and care, she engages nearly every aspect of our world—the political, the natural, the theoretical, the familial, the theological, the personal. One section of the book is devoted entirely to poems about works of art, ranging from Rembrandt to Diane Arbus—a fitting metaphor for the expansive reach of her vision. These poems may span over four decades of writing, but the poems of Frangible Operas will hold their notes for as long as we are singing.”
— Dean Rader, author of Self-Portrait as a Wikipedia Entry
Gatherer’s Alphabet (Gunpowder Press, 2022)
These luscious poems feel like small museums of infinite wonder. Gallery, butterfly, stars in autumn. The wisdom of nature, the work of angels, what women endure—I love these poems. A timeless grace breathes through this marvelous book, this bounty you’ll be grateful that you read. —Lee Herrick, Fresno Poet Laureate (2015-17) author of Scar and Flower, Gardening Secrets of the Dead, and This Many Miles from Desire
Susan Kelly-DeWitt’s concentrations come to life as if in a studio, with watercolor washes and ink accentuations. As well as mother and father, ghosts and angels, words are animated characters urgently communicating— whistling to animals or dogwood gods, pinches of anger too—a tool to save us. Is she holding a pen—or a moth by its wings? Poems like “Words” and “The Thorne Miniatures” and the title poem gaze multi-eyed at the reader from the palm of her offering hand. — Sandra McPherson, author of The 5150 Poems and Speech Crush
What I love about Susan Kelly-DeWitt’s poems are the colors, how they “hold / themselves out / to be touched.” Her mother is described as having “storm-colored hair.” Silence is a “white bulb.” The past is a minefield of blue flowers. This bringing together of nature and mind, the mundane and the transcendent, is the result of the poet’s unrestrained sympathy for all living things. Kelly-DeWitt’s companions in this vision-quest are O’Keeffe and Van Gogh, artists who paint not the appearance of field and cloud, but the primal energy beneath the surface. The act of seeing is the true subject here. We are fortunate to have Kelly-DeWitt to guide us through this journey. —Michael Simms, editor of Vox Populi, author of Nightjar
Coming from a world “sheltered by cold leaves of starlight,” Susan Kelly-DeWitt’s powerful new work serves as a garden for ghosts, windows, and angels capable of making ordinary events extraordinary. A sharp sense of loss is integral to Gatherer’s Alphabet, which is steeped in the particulars of memory, the pebbles, the dark pits. Here is an “impossible country of imagination“ that must be visited over and over. —Maya Khosla, Poet Laureate Emerita of Sonoma County, author of All the Fires of Wind and Light
Gravitational Tug (Main Street Rag, 2020)
Susan Kelly-DeWitt is a poet who finds the marvelous in the everyday, who finds in our silent moments a music, who finds wisdom in our fears and passions, and teaches us to slow down and see ourselves in ourselves. I love her work. –Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa
In Gravitational Tug Susan Kelly DeWitt gives us fifty-one exquisitely crafted, lyrical poems which are part Buddhist, part Pagan, and part Christian, yet which reach beyond conventional religious categories to create a living Nature that stares back at us as we look at it. There is nothing sentimental in this collection, no wasted words, no excess. These poems move quickly, escaping the tug of gravity like a sudden flight of birds. –Mary Mackey, author of The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams, winner of the 2019 Eric Hoffer Award for best book published by a small press
Spider Season
(Cold River Press, 2016)
Susan Kelly-DeWitt finds poems everywhere, or perhaps they find her, falling around her like snowflakes or cascading leaves: rivers, doorknobs, graveyards, dragonflies, all alight in a language that is inventive and freighted with attention. “Your gull-colored mood,” “the dragonflies…their stickpin glit darting before me,” crows circling “like black Conestogas”—you get the idea. She sees the world her own way and writes her mind. And this is exactly what good poets do.– Frank Gaspar
The poems in Susan Kelly-DeWitt’s SPIDER SEASON reflect our human desire to weave the inner and outer worlds into an ordered pattern: like the spider’s web, these poems are delicate, made of strong filament, and vulnerable—impermanence proves to be a force as strong as the desire for order. This book beautifully renders the process, rewards and disappointments of this universal human struggle. –Jane Mead
In this brilliant book, pure music is charged with an emotion unmistakably real. The images here are alive; they are vivid and sensual. Unlike much contemporary poetry that sounds professorial, Kelly-DeWitt’s voice is one that knows, as Lorca knew, that the only thing a poet is a professor of is the “five senses.” Like Rodin, about whose work she writes so beautifully, Kelly-DeWitt understands that an artist strips “passion / to dark bone” and forges “arduous coupling from / the soul’s lack.” This is a wise, beautiful collection of poems that will stay with you long after you finish the book. –Ilya Kaminsky
The Fortunate Islands (Marick Press, 2008)
These poems take pleasure in the multiplicity of things—“each blossom shakes/ out the night’s wet mix// of stars and dark”—whatever personal loss or change. Their power is in their spiritual longing. They are graceful, so accurate and deep in their discernment—I have different favorites with every reading. – Dennis Schmitz
Susan Kelly-DeWitt breaks our hearts and puts them together again with words. She extends our palpable sense of the child at the mercy of the loved, feared, drunken father made flesh by Roethke’s poem. Here, we are undefended—no fun with this father—we are inside the child’s fear. As we must, we recoil from the alcoholic father; but like his daughter, we also empathize and pity him: “…it will seem to those who love him/that some invisible shrapnel festers his soul.” Like her, we wonder “What was it that tore/his insides?” Finally, we too are freed by her dream wish of the Feather River’s rising “to lift/his cumbersome skiff/into the open sea.” Susan Kelly-DeWitt follows Ptolemy, choosing to run her prime meridian, her original orientation, through the Fortunate Islands, where “the past seems far away// I can cross the wooden bridge/in either direction.” And illuminated along the way by her stunning imagery, her brilliant conjunctions of language, art, personal history, we hasten to follow her. –Carole Simmons Oles
These poems are sure-footed, engaging, broad in subject matter but grounded in the poet’s wary detective-mind. I have a strong feeling for the most “psychological” of the poems, and those with psychological twists in the last stanza. The poems in this collection feel emotionally complete. –Sandra McPherson
Cassiopeia Above the Banyan Tree (Rattlesnake Press, 2007)
Cassiopeia Above the Banyan Tree
The Land (Rattlesnake Press, 2005)
Susan Kelly-DeWitt is a poet of natural nouns; she points directly at things — flowers and trees, animals and insects; grandmothers and Iron Age murder victims. She uses all the primary colors, and silver, carmine, pink and lemon as well. In this latest book there are mockingbirds, owls, egrets, alligators, wolves, rats, lizards and spiders. There are oaks and dogwood, fungi and roses, tulips and cedars. And to all of these Kelly-DeWitt brings her precise, scientist-like descriptions…….she creates by naming what exists in the world around her, observing with empathy and without overt judgment. –James DenBoer
Susan Kelly-DeWitt’s Greatest Hits (Kattywompus Press, 2003)
Susan Kelly-Dewitt Greatest Hits 1983-2002
The Audience
(Uptown Books, 2007)
Out of print
The Audience
The Book of Insects
The Book of Insects
(Spruce Street Press, 2003)
Out of print
I’m glad Frith Press has brought out the few poems that are packaged in this unassuming chapbook. As if following the dictum of William Carlos Williams, “No ideas but in things,” Kelly-DeWitt’s poems show so much in a few lines – a scene, an epiphany, a deeply felt emotion. They also share the craft and erudition, as well as the empathy and compassion, of Kelly-DeWitt’s teacher Denise Levertov. Perhaps their humility comes from being rooted in a place whose time has not yet come. And that may be a good thing. They are not full of themselves. –Carol Frith
To A Small Moth
To A Small Moth
(Poet’s Corner Press, 2001)
Out of print
Kelly- DeWitt’s poems remind us, as we must be reminded, that no matter what, a beautiful and timeless world surrounds us; we must take the time to peer into it, but if we have Kelly-DeWitt’s wisdom and willingness, her hard-earned grace and vision, we may be privileged enough to participate in ancient and sacred ways. –Walter Pavlich
Feather’s Hand
Feather’s Hand
(Swan Scythe Press, 2000)
Out of print
Angels, saints and sages populate these very material, very quotidian, delightful poems, speaking in noisy inner voices the pained, humorous truths of our world. –Marilyn Nelson
A Camellia for Judy
A Camellia for Judy
(Frith Press, 1998)
Out of print
The poems in Susan Kelly-DeWitt’s chapbook, A Camellia for Judy, are poems of grieving and redemption. They are poems of a place. They are humble poems. Kelly-DeWitt can invest nature with intense feeling, and yet not sentimentalize it. Sometimes she shows it in such brutal honesty as to be almost morbid, but the poems always end on a note of hope; they are never the condescending poems of one who feels superior. –Jane Blue