PUBLICATION DATE: October 25, 2026
"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
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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.