books

Tell Me The Moon

Poems Deerbrook Editions 2024 available now for early orders https://www.deerbrookeditions.com/

praise for Tell Me The Moon

Caroline Sulzer’s poems are precise and eloquent.  In Tell Me The Moon, she uses language to build a rich visual world where we become aware of the profound manifestations of time’s passage. Reading her lyrical work, we both ache and celebrate as she writes from the perspectives of mother, daughter, and granddaughter. She has created a liminal space where we can move back and forth in time and experience the complexities of loss and love.

—Stuart Kestenbaum Maine Poet Laureate 2015-2021

I knew Caroline Sulzer as a painter before I read her poems. And so I cannot help but read these poems through the prism—especially the pale blues and mossy greens—of her canvases. Yet these poems came first. So perhaps it’s better to say that these texts were always brimming with colors and textures, clamoring to exist on canvas as well as paper.

Above all, though, this volume is packed with memories. Not only Sulzer’s own, but the memories she imagines for her forbears and the ones she transmits to her children. Sulzer dances elegantly across time and space invoking memories in order to set them, and indeed herself, free. While she summons personal memories, what Sulzer bequeaths to the reader is a gift for navigating memory itself, learning to trace its movements with delight as much as obligation.

—Aaron Rosen, PhD, Executive Director of The Clemente Course in the Humanities and Visiting Professor of Sacred Traditions & the Arts at King’s College London; author of What Would Jesus See? and many other books.

Caroline Sulzer’s Tell Me The Moon is a singular book, both urgently current and timeless. Each poem cracked me open in small increments—cracked me open in totally unanticipated ways. She’s a tender and wise writer, gut honest, the language sustenance in her hands, where sometimes ‘Sentences are violet / moving toward or away / from the violent.’ Such deft handling of joy and sorrow, loss! Flowing through the book, like a river, it seems, making a way for these poems of the personal, universal, and ecological to rise and drift, to open, is also a multi-section poem, ‘Inheritance,’ with all that word carries, including that ‘Secrets kept from us can keep us.’ Read with your full, attentive heart. You’ll be grateful.

—Anneliese Jakimides, Finalist for the Stephen Dunn Poetry Prize

These are poems that come from a long, introspective listening to life with its gains and loss. Anchored by a series of poems considering “inheritance,” Sulzer looks with unflinching honesty and tender regard at the gifts and burdens passed across generations. “Love is not deaf/ I still hear her voice,” she writes, and we sense the quiet reach of her probing eye. “Close your eyes/bend down low, now open,” she recalls in the opening poem, an image that conveys the subtle contours of this collection as a whole. These are poems that arise from a patient remembering. They invite a slow reading as they evoke themes that span the tensions of melancholy and longing—in the poet’s journey and in ours. In her wondering about how “inheritance” shapes us, she asks: “What is it we choose to keep?/ And what keeps us?” Whether remembering her ancestors or reflecting on her own children’s journeys, Sulzer writes with an unflinching and sometimes fierce honesty, but also with a tender care for the quiet joys that come unexpectedly.

Her poems drift between melancholy and those moments of startlement that come from life closely observed, suggesting again and again how the outer and inner worlds meet and mingle.

These are poems that muse in the remembering and beckon in the pondering; they wonder with us about how to live with inheritances that refuse to let us go, and those we only dimly grasp: “I do not yet understand his loneliness,/the loneliness of the open heart.” Sulzer discovers glints of light rising from the shadows that refuse our clarities and yet somehow hold the secrets that carry us.

—Mark S. Burrows, author of The Chance of Home. Poems and translator, most recently, of The Wandering Radiance: Selected Poems of Hilde Domin

From the buzzing lights of The Blue Hill Fair to a well-stacked woodshed—from the bleak hush of winter to the first laurel shoots of spring—the poems in Caroline Sulzer’s Tell Me The Moon describe the seasons in Maine as deftly as a spider weaves her trap, “delicate tough work that catches the morning /light.” With equal care, Sulzer chronicles the seasons that stretch from childhood to sundown. Meditating on motherhood, eldercare, and loss, Sulzer serves grief and joy in the same cup. Heartache falls from a desk drawer, a man falls from the world, children fall into a sleep as “total as moss.” These poems ask, “tell me the moon” and “where are we going, where have we been?” They promise to keep the secrets that slip from the “blue violet tongues” of irises.

—Summer J. Hart, author of Boomhouse

In the Disappearing Water (a novel) 2009 (currently out of print as I pulled it from the publisher, but this could change.)

Paper Weight with Andrea Sulzer, Poems and images (2010)