PUBLICATION DATE: October 25, 2026
"Everybody old enough has some story like this. Whereas most of us are rendered mute in the shocks of climate crisis, cancer diagnosis, medical error, fatality, Suzanne Swanson writes from within these concussed states of heightened physicality and consciousness. Her words are clear. Her images, spare yet detailed. This book is filled with the kinds of lists noticers make, such as a birder’s life list ending with peregrine. From the first poem in A Whole Life Left, Swanson places herself, and us, in a boat and the boat is the world. Her poems reach with our unanswerable whys and undefinable terms beyond that boat’s oarlocks to where blades meet our beautiful rowing lives."
- Su Love, author of The Memoir of Mona Lisa
"How can a book so filled with grief bring such a sense of life ongoing? Let the poet speak for herself as she does in this short poem:
Steadfast, this grief
Like the stars
Like their light, strenuous
And watery, delivered
Out of the deep
Blue. Your dying
A kind of miracle
Something
Out of nothing.
A Whole Life Left is a powerful and luminous book: powerful because it is suffused with love and luminous because the grief at its center has been transformed into a light by which we can live our lives. To read this book is to hold "a whole life" in your hands. As such it is a privilege to be invited to read it. It is a book that lives at the intersection of love and sorrow. What more can we ask of a book of poetry than that it allows us, as readers, live at that intersection, too?"
—Jim Moore, poet, author of Underground: New & Selected Poems and Enter
“We begin with the brilliant ‘Prelude Cosmology: through a glass’ which leads us into this haunted and haunting collection of poems. Haunted by death, fear of dying, and haunted, too, by life, the life that's left, not just the narrator's life, but the life of the beloved river, the land, the music, the life, intangible and full of power, that glimmers inside the idea of the future. How I love and admire these poems. Easy to imagine hundreds of readers, speaking her indelible lines, as she guides us with such honesty into our own fears, hopes, our own deepest solitudes. A remarkable, beautiful collection of poems. Lucky us.”
—Deborah Keenan, poet and author of eleven collections of poems, including The Saint of Everything
SUZANNE SWANSON is the author of House of Music and the chapbook What Other Worlds: Postpartum Poems. She is a winner of the Loft Mentor Series; she helped to found Laurel Poetry Collective. Recent poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, NELLE, Water~Stone Review, and Land Stewardship Letter. She is happiest near big water.