Therefore, Illuminated is a fierce love poem of a book, the kind that can only be written by someone who has lost and struggled and faced betrayal after betrayal, injustice after injustice, and somehow still finds a way to show up and notice the throng of sunflowers outside the window. I want to cheer for the tenacity, the courage, the devotion it took to write these poems. I want to honor that somehow Susan Vespoli alchemized fury and fuckery into art. "You don't get to choose love, it just happens," she writes. Here we see humanity at its worst and also the determination, the grace it takes to "still believe good will prevail." This book is a triumph. -Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, author of The Unfolding and host of The Poetic Path
How do we confront the unimaginable, unbearable loss of a child? What does it mean to be the mother of an active addict? How do we live with grief when it is accompanied by systematic injustice & prejudice? And ultimately, when it comes, how do we let in what light breaks through? These are the important, agonizing questions explored with unflinching honesty in Susan Vespoli's powerful, profound poetry collection Therefore, Illuminated. In the end, we come to understand that this collection is not only a curation of a mother's grief, but of her survival. It is elegiac, yes, but it is ultimately a testament to the power of acceptance, surrender & the determination to carry on.
-Joan Kwon Glass, author of Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms & Night Swim
Much poetry aspires to transcend the everyday-not the work of Susan Vespoli. Hers is a poetry incorrigibly committed to claiming and reclaiming a world at its most painfully quotidian, even and especially when that world has broken every promise. Therefore, Illuminated features speakers who forgo flimsy mercies and who, across forms and tones, renew themselves and us with bare-knuckled honesty and with a humor identifiable only as a sister to loss. This book lives where we live and breathes as we breathe.
-Joshua Davis, author of Reversal Spells in Blue and Black
