Keep and Give Away

"Whether Susan Meyers describes the cry of a loon, a boat trip into a swamp, or casting a net, the images in Keep and Give Away are striking and resonate with the book's central paradox of loving and letting go. Though Meyers does not turn from painful experience like her mother's decline, lingering death, and the black hole of its aftermath, her dominant impulse is to celebrate and, as she says in one poem, 'learn to look for the overlooked.' This is a first collection full of finely crafted poems—free verse and poems in form—that are alive and radiantly detailed, pleasurable and poignant."—Cathy Smith Bowers, author of A Book of Minutes and Traveling in Time of Danger

"Keep and Give Away offers us countless resounding, delicate notes. We might fall, submit to loss, were there no art such as this to keep us upright in the world."—Terrance Hayes, author of Wind in a Box and Hip Logic, from the foreword

Winner of the South Carolina Poetry Book Prize
Winner of the 2007 Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Award for Poetry
Winner of the 2007 Brockman-Campbell Book Award, North Carolina Poetry Society