Author: Susan Tekulve
Paperback, 88 pages, 2024
ISBN-13: 978-1-947175-61-7

About the Author

Susan Tekulve’s newest book Bodies of Light is her first full-length poetry collection. She is the author of Second Shift: Essays (Del Sol Press) and In the Garden of Stone (Hub City Press), winner of the South Carolina Novel Prize and a Gold IPPY Award. She’s also published two short story collections: Savage Pilgrims (Serving House Books) and My Mother’s War Stories (Winnow Press). Her photo essay, “White Blossoms,” appeared in Issue 12 of the KYSO Flash Anthology. Her nonfiction, fiction, and poetry has appeared in journals such as Denver Quarterly, The Georgia Review, The Louisville Review, Puerto del Sol, New Letters, and Shenandoah. Her web chapbook, Wash Day, appears in the Web Del Sol International Chapbook Series, and her story collection, My Mother’s War Stories, received the 2004 Winnow Press fiction prize. She has received scholarships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She teaches in the BFA and MFA writing programs at Converse University.

Susan Tekulve’s Bodies of Light both illuminates and enchants. In odes to body parts—teeth and thumbs, feet and hair—as well as bodies inside bodies (pregnancies), this poet delights in the corporal and spiritual. In elegies, Tekulve honors the bodies of her beloved dead and the magic of her garden. Hummingbirds, tarantulas, stinkbugs, spiders, and bees wearing “tiny yellow combat boots” populate these terrific poems of wonder and dazzle.

–Denise Duhamel, author of Pink Lady, Scald, and Blowout 

It’s a kind of magic, the way Susan Tekulve’s forthright monosyllabic titles (Bonnet, Grief, Kimono, Son—the list goes on) blossom into poems so lush in vision, so voluptuous in vocabulary and song, they feel as bountiful as the planet we live on.  Tekulve’s poems have their specific concerns of course (parenting, for example, and world travel) but ultimately she’s in love with existence itself, whether elegiac or celebratory, and her one-word titles (Relics, Geodes, Feathers: the list goes on) are keys to a lavish proof of that love’s great depth.

         –Albert Goldbarth, author of History (and Pre-), Saving Lives, and Heaven and Earth: A Cosmology

Susan Tekulve’s Bodies of Light shimmers with life.  In “Yellow Jackets” she writes [f]or how they twirled me, disrobing gardening gloves, shirt, jeans,/like Salome dancing the seven scarves as they chased me across my yard/….For how they taught me to kneel and pray/for breathing. In “Feet” she notes bees whose hind claws are so compacted with pollen/they appear to wear tiny yellow combat boots.  She records of her newborn son your fingers fluttering the air/as if moving over frets/of an invisible guitar,/and I knew you were the first music/I’d ever made. Both sensory-rich and deeply cerebral, attentive to both body and soul, these poems remind that Tekulve is one of our best writers about nature, which is to say that she is writing some of the most important poetry of our time.

Suzanne Cleary, author of Beauty Mark, Trick Pear, and Keeping Time