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Blue Lyra Press, 2019
Poems from Susurration were first published in I-70 Review, Josephine Quarterly, Literary Mama, Pilgrimage, Sinister Wisdom, the minnesota review, the museum of americana, and elsewhere.
With equal parts tenderness and fierceness, Allison Blevins shares startlingly original and courageous poetry that simmers and shimmers with susurration: the word that truly sounds like the whispering, rustling, and murmuring it is. “A mother was a child once without love. She calls the earth a person./ In the beginning, no one needed to be told how to become a person,” Blevins writes in this remarkable collection of embodied poems, each one a shining and searing exploration of how to love, live, and be woman and mother. What we as readers hear and see here are deep forays into love and loss, grief and gratitude, motherhood and loverhood, all kindled by the fire of women loving women. Altogether, these poems speak to the pain, pleasure, and possibilities of such love and with the embodied wisdom of living that love.
—Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, 2009-13 Kansas Poet Laureate and author of Miriam's Well
Allison Blevins’s poems shepherd us through her speakers’ innermost territories—their hillsides and ravines. We experience lust’s undeniable electricity, the anguish of the abandoned, motherhood’s trials. In Susurration, complex moments spread over the pages like wounds, as with this painful challenge: “Memorize the sound of laughter / exploding from the mouth / of a lover at great distance: a clasp’s / hook letting go of its eye.” We understand that many lines in these poems are not mere pleas or lamentations, but works of magic and healing.
—Elijah Burrell, author of Troubler and The Skin of the River