Lake Erie Blue

by Susan Grimm

Price 87 pages, $12.95 paper

ISBN 1-886157-46-4

In Lake Erie Blue, Susan Grimm has created a vibrant and haunted city of desire lying along a great lake that ripples with mystery. She sings of the one place we know more and less about than any other: home. These poems, at once satisfying and disturbing portraits of families and survivors, young immigrants and citizens of the neighborhood, are reports of the search for human communion and transcendence, streets illuminated with truth, and a time “When love was not recognized but given like a sweet scoop of apple on a spoon.” --David Citino

Equal parts wildcat and tureen of familial soup, Lake Erie Blue embodies what it means to know a place deeply, a rare delight in our rootless culture. Familiarity, for Grimm, breeds not contempt but its ecstatic opposite. Savor her sun-etched portraits, her landscapes of appetite and sacrament. The book you hold in your hands will spin you to a world where connection breeds fulfillment. --Karen Kovacik

Susan Grimm’s poems practice what they preach. “Think interior like a geode,” commands her concluding poem in Lake Erie Blue, and we recognize in that line the crystalline brilliance shining at the heart of each of Grimm’s poems. Her subjects range from an explosive shipwreck in Lake Erie to quiet shipwrecks of desire; from the “inexplicable pink tinge of joy” to the slow, dark days of grief. And the language of Lake Erie Blue is as vast, startling, and unpredictable as the great body of water the book is named for. Grimm’s adventurous music makes each poem, line by line, “all voyage, surprise.” Lynn Powell, author of Old & New Testaments and The Zones of Paradise

In these accomplished, understated poems Susan Grimm wonderfully achieves two things that would seem mutually exclusive: the vivid and convincing evocation of her family life in its ordinary, working-class setting, and the simultaneous transformation of this material into an exciting aesthetic experience full of surprise and mystery. As Grimm lovingly pulls out past sights, sounds, smells, and feelings like treasures discovered in the attic—“the dangle of skinny legs” as she sits on her mother’s lap, “the loaf of bread like a little house,” her puckery lavender “darkening, from the bottom up,” when she wades into the lake—the small joys and griefs of growing up in a dingy Midwestern industrial town take on a larger meaning. Lake Erie is always on the horizon—seductive, treacherous, shallow, unfathomable. Grimm never tells too much, but she savors every word: one of the pleasures of this volume is the masterly play of her language. It is a book to be enjoyed on the first reading and many times thereafter. --Leonard Trawick, former director, Cleveland State University Poetry Center

Susan Grimm lives in Cleveland, Ohio. Lake Erie Blue is her first full-length poetry collection. She is also the author of the chapbook Almost Home (Cleveland State University Poetry Center). Her writing has appeared in such publications as the Plain Dealer, Rattapallax, and Spoon River Poetry Review. She is a recipient of an Ohio Arts Council fellowship in poetry and the Ohio Poet of the Year Award from the Ohio Poetry Day Association. She teaches at Cleveland State University.