Susan Deborah King teaches writing and leads retreats on spirituality and creativity. Her last poetry book was Coven (2006). She lives in Minneapolis and on an island in Maine with her husband, and is mother to grown twin daughters.
"Anyone anticipating something conventional from these flower poems
is in for a stunning surprise. Dropping Into The Flower is by turns
passionately sexual, wrenching, heartbreakingly elegiac, humorous,
tender, joyous, celebratory--and always unexpected. Susan King has
indeed dropped deep into the flower of our complicated, confusing
lives and given us metaphors to help us understand them. In one
poem, 'Bringing Them Back Out, ' she writes of someone who happens
upon flowers in her garden and is mesmerized by their gorgeous
colors: 'They didn't see you coming./ They didn't have time to
close up.' That is what will happen to the reader of this
collection. You won't see what is coming, and you won't have time
to close up."--Susan Allen Toth, author of Leaning into the Wind
"In one of the poems in Dropping into the Flower, Susan Deborah
King writes of the 'intersection where/heaven turns to earth and
earth to heaven.' There is a majestic yearning for harmony between
the realms of spirit and flesh in these poems. They put me in mind
of the best in the tradition of the Romantic poets in the way they
celebrate the beauties of the physical world while acknowledging
the darker truths of loss. This collection deserves to be in the
company of Wordsworth and Frost and Mary Oliver."--Jim Heynen,
author of The Fall of Alice K.: A Novel "What are we to learn from
the loss of loved ones, from the unspeakable tragedy of a young
person's accidental gun death, from wounds that can never heal,
from bombs and plagues and mass killings? Sam King, a gentle leader
indeed, teaches us to plant our griefs and sorrows along with our
tulip bulbs - and then to watch, wait and witness the explosion of
life they hold. In these poems, she does God's work."--Sarah T
(Sally) Williams, former book editor, the Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Bright, lively, high-powered, sensuous: Susan Deborah King's
Dropping into the Flower is no ditzy stroll through daisies. The
world's mayhem, 'hideous with grief' remains elbow-near. But King
offers readers these beautifully crafted poems; they remind us that
a garden's life-cycle can '...raise the alarming/ standard of
love.' Her poems are allegories, metaphors, crescendos of passion,
of life. They are irrepressible outbursts like the graffiti King
found on the Appalachian Trail: 'I was love.' This is poetry that
urges us to see that '...(to) have one's essence be/to another/(is)
utterly essential...' and to live, 'as if your soul were a seed
splitting open.'"--Sharon Chmielarz, author of Love from the
Yellowstone Trail
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