In Susan Azar Porterfield's Voice/Poems, readers will encounter various voices, not all of them sanguine. Some are testy, others reverential. Some are humorous, others not so much. The reader can expect a guide, but the guides may not bother to be consistent. Graceful and intimate, Voice/Poems plucks individual moments from the flow of time to show us how crazy remarkable our ordinary, day-in and day-out, lives are. We are a multitude and a solitude, "a glory, tiny veins in our fingers, /pulley of skin working index and thumb." In these stunning, delicate poems, there is a fierce intelligence and a great tenderness. Susan Azar Porterfield is a master of restraint and deeply mines the domestic interior of her life in poem after poem. Through her speakers, she offers us meditations on family, loss, and presents us with the beauty of her lush mind. I am thoroughly moved by Susan's poems, and I highly recommend this new collection. -Zeeshan Pathan, author of The Minister of Disturbances Susan Azar Porterfield writes intelligently and surrealistically in the same poem. Her poems often circle subjects with strong imagery and inventive language, with original verbs and striking juxtapositions. Dreams, houses, bodies, sleep, death, trees create a web of connection. Her examination of the concepts of god and soul is both a questioning and a quest. - Marge Piercy, author of The Moon is Always Female Susan Azar Porterfield's Voice/Poems opens with a gripping Ars Poetica, and hold on, reader, for we are asked to enter "the emptied dark without being able to see." What a gift to enter Porterfield's wild imagination, a speaker seeming to work out a problem in real time, offering both surprise and insight "as if a sparrow had nested in [her] chest, /something intimate, something odd." With voices philosophical, self-reflective, and playful, poems speak of mortality, presence, illness, grief and love. Meet a child, "a little radish in the earth./Her body, /snug as a nest." Follow the life cycle of a house that rises and falls, that "rushes now/faster and faster/anxious to be headed/to where it once began." Listen to the ingenious and deeply meaningful dialectic between the soul and the self who take prerequisites, who banter, who graduate to higher levels of spirituality, who travel to Paris and fall in love, the soul wanting "steak, slightly pink." This is a poet of profound wisdom and empathy, one with an ecologist's intelligence, where humans, animals, and landforms possess permeable membranes. Porterfield writes, "So/much is beautiful. It breaks us." In the emptied dark of this world, Voice/Poems helps us hold onto mystery, knowing that nothing belongs to us and that everything is possible. Susan Azar Porterfield is one of the best contemporary poets I know, and Voice/Poems one of the best collections I've read. - Janine Certo, author of O Body of Bliss Susan Azar Porterfield is the author of three previous books of poetry: In the Garden of Our Spines, Kibbe (Mayapple Press) and Dirt, Root, Silk, which won the Cider Press Review Editor's Prize. Individual poems are in Michigan Quarterly Review, The Georgia Review, Barrow Street, EcoTheo, Painted Bride, Mid-American Review, North American Review, Crab Orchard Review, Nimrod, Rhino, Puerto del Sol, Poetry Ireland Review, Slipstream, Room, Ambit, Magma. She is the editor of Zen, Poetry, the Art of Lucien Stryk (Ohio UP) and has written for Poets & Writers, The Writer's Chronicle, Translation Review, The Midwest Journal of the Modern Language Association. She is the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Award for Poetry and a Fulbright to Lebanon. She has a Ph.D. in Literature and a M.A. in British Art from the Courtauld Institute in London.