Negative Space

poems by

Susan Kress

~80 pages, $15 (+ shipping)

Projected Release Date: April 2027

The Advance Sale Discount price on this books is $9. For those who prefer to pay by check, the discount price is $13.50/book (which includes shipping & sales tax) and should be sent to: Main Street Rag, 12180 Skyview Drive, Edinboro, PA 16412. Both advance sale prices will expire once the book is sent to press. 

PLEASE NOTE: Ordering in advance of the release date entitles the buyer to a discount. It does not mean the book will ship before the date posted above and the price only applies to copies ordered through the Main Street Rag Online Bookstore.

Susan Kress taught at Skidmore College for many years and was the inaugural holder of the Class of 1948 Chair for Excellence in Teaching. She has published numerous essays and articles, and a biography, Carolyn G. Heilbrun: Feminist in a Tenured Position (University of Virginia Press), reissued in paperback with a new epilogue. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and appear in Beloit Poetry Journal, Calyx, New Letters, New Ohio Review, Nimrod International, Salmagundi, The Southern Review, and many other journals. Negative Space is her debut poetry collection. Born and educated in England, Susan lives in Saratoga Springs, New York. Visit her at susankress.com

The poems of Susan Kress—intense, ruthlessly honest, never fragile or tepid—emerge with a cleansing, liberating humor and steely determination to face down loss and calamity. Negative Space is a book for grown-ups, sly and sophisticated, alert to mischief and desire, charting an unsteady progress from childhood and adolescence to old age. Stoical, intimate, unillusioned, companionable, the speaker in these poems refuses to be “talked out of unbelief” or to renounce joy. ~Peg Boyers, author of Hard Bread, Honey with Tobacco, To Forget Venice and The Album.

Where has Susan Kress been all our lives? The poems in Negative Space glow with such mastery of pacing and structure, such ingratiating wit and deep feeling, that it’s hard to believe this is her debut collection. Her work expresses the rhythms, passions, and yes, absurdities of a fully lived life: a Jewish English girlhood, a long, loving marriage, motherhood’s terrors, and intimations of mortality, all with a precise, skeptical eye that will not flinch. ~Jay Rogoff, author of Loving in Truth and Becoming Poetry

In Negative Space, Susan Kress traces the arc of a life: her parents’ poverty, her wastrel father and illiterate grandmother, illness—but also the poet as giddy adolescent, then young mother, and eventually, as ageing, still mischievously romantic wife. Her poems pulse with wit, sass, and an exuberant life force. They translate pain and loss into a triumph of spirit. ~Rosanna Warren, author of Hindsight, and The Fair Fields: My Way to Words

The Marriage of True Minds

Let’s put our heads together
and mingle thoughts
and let our verve
serve to multiply those thoughts
until we are quite drunk
with generating thoughts
and let’s not be circumspect and tactful
but let our thoughts gambol
like balloons in a waft of air
or join joyfully
under coverts and spread
like the scent of afternoon lavender
oh let’s lay bare
our intertwined insinuations
for they’re our thoughts after all
we propagated them together.

Thanksgiving

for Abe, 19??-1984

Motherless before the cord
was even cut, he fled his home
on foot at nine with a sister
not much older. We always thought
pogroms had driven them
from Volochisk but he would not say—
this small quiet man, whose son I married.
I once surprised him in my kitchen
at Thanksgiving when the house was sleeping.
He’d peeled and cut across
the grain a king-sized yellow onion,
sprinkling salt to draw the juice.
Not the turkey, not the stuffing,
not the chestnuts I had roasted for him,
but this was the food that summoned from the past
his thankfulness when hunger was a habit.
His legacy was just one drawer of things:
a wallet, watch, his door key,
and a small black book, inscribed
with secret recipes
for syrups he’d peddled store
to candy store before
the soda giants forced him
out of work. Best country in the world, this is,
he’d say, then sing his prayer to shoo away
the evil eye, rocking on ruined feet.

Fire-Proof Box

You need one, my daughter says, checking burners
on the stove, having caught from me faith
in imminent calamity. What if the house burns down?
Turns everything to ash? So we send my husband
out to Walmart for what looks just like a little suitcase—
but now I’m not sure what to pack and what
to leave behind. Whether to fold or roll up doubts.
Whether to use those handy cubes to separate the facts
from fiction. Put in only things you can’t replace
my daughter interrupts. I point toward
the stained-glass window that turns the hallway
blue and purple. The smooth gray stones I stole
from Margate beach. And mother’s good wool coat,
of course. I wish I had her ashes, too, but she is buried
in a wooden box in another country, making conversation
quite impossible. Your will. Insurance policies,
my daughter urges, spilling drawers of the maple bureau.
She’s strong-willed, like me. I can count on her
to file the proper paperwork for any journey
across borders. What about the grandchildren? I ask,
not revealing yet my plan to slip them in somehow.