Three Hours to Burn a Body, Poems by Suzanne Roberts
The poems of Suzanne Roberts' Three Hours to Burn a Body range widely over the earth, yet they are as intimate in their touch as the body itself.
Sample Poems by Suzanne Roberts
“In an age where cultures, people, and place are so easily objectified, reduced to abstractions, commodities, or statistics, Three Hours to Burn a Body is a collection that returns us, thankfully, to earth. Across India, China, and Mongolia, to California, England, and all over Latin America, Suzanne Roberts shares the view at ground level, the brutality and grace and sometimes transcendence in the lives of everyday people. She reminds us that travel can be an act of remembrance. This is an important and moving work.” —David Miller
“Suzanne Roberts’ book of travel poems flits with the sadness of blue butterflies through the Amazon rainforest (a green dream turning to the scarred crackle of grass and stumps). It washes to shore in Nicaragua with garbage and American tourists who hunt the cobblestoned streets for child prostitutes giggling in their mothers’ make-up. Roberts travels the world on the margin of desire, with the freedom of loneliness, and these poems are the flame that ‘twists from the ghost of an eye,’ the flame of bodies burning and raining in our hair like ash, they are dawn prayers from a mosque, and the sun like a tangerine behind the gauzy net of the world. Journey with this book, and you will hear in that strange passage the pathos of all passages through, and the glancing knowledge of what it means to be in time, trying to understand what goes by ‘like a stranger’s secret [you] overhear in passing.’”--Tony Barnstone
“Each poem takes us beyond the song of the body and shadow, and asks us to rise above the mist, the rain, and the hours. And without realizing, we find a new way of travelling. Provoking and thrilling!”—Nathalie Handal
Suzanne Roberts is the author of two previous collections of poetry, Shameless (Cherry Grove Collections, 2007) and Nothing to You (Pecan Grove Press, 2008). She was named “The Next Great Travel Writer” by National Geographic’s Traveler. She holds a doctorate in Literature and the Environment from the University of Nevada-Reno and currently writes and teaches in South Lake Tahoe, California. For more information, please visit her website at http://www.suzanneroberts.org.
ISBN 978-1936370375, 80 pages, $18.00