In the Novel

By Susan Stewart b. 1952 Susan Stewart

He described her mouth as full of ashes.

So when he kissed her finally

he was thinking about ashes

and the blacker rim just below

the edge of the ashtray,

and the faint dark rim that outlined her lips,

and the lips themselves, at the limit

of another darkness, farther

and far more interior.

Then the way the red,

paling, just outside those lines

caught fire and the pages caught

soon after that. Slowly at first,

but then all at once

at the scalloped brown corners of each;

like the ruff of an offended and darkening bird,

extended, then folded

in on itself; multiple,

stiffening, gone.

Source: The Hive (University of Georgia Press, 1987)

Biography

In an interview at the University of Pennsylvania, Susan Stewart said that her primary goal as a poet is “to get people to read more slowly, and to reread, and to read a whole book and go back to the beginning of the book and see connections.” Her writing can be startlingly clear, while at the same time—in the words of the MacArthur Foundation, on the occasion of presenting her with a “Genius Award”—it makes “strange and . . .

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