Passenger

Maxwell's poems reflect that the complexity and intricacy of their making is intrinsic to their meaning. These poems are bold with their gorgeousness; like the clapper inside the oscillating bell, they will make the hollowness resound.

* author of Apprehend *

In Susan Maxwell's Passenger, one is immediately swept into a world of great freshness, banishing, from the very outset, any sense of the predeterminate. In its originality, her syllables come to cohere like tesserae in one sonorous mosaic after another. Far from depicting, they explore the often unbidden reaches of the given world in all its mystery and ambivalence. In Maxwell's speculative landscapes, it's us, the readers, that become the enthralled passengers.

* author of In the Name of the Neither *

'I held your mouth while it kicked, while it rose off you, the thing you imagined had built you': Susan Maxwell’s sense of language’s necessary and dissatisfied traffic with illusion is uncompromising. Maxwell invents, with the strong originality of a de Chirico, a strange, brilliantly detiled world whose fantastic cities are versions of our own, but 'in echo and gust,' in 'space flooded with space.' We, too, know of 'withholding nothing from the law' while feeling bewildered as to where we really belong, what with the 'ear stemmed wide in the water.'

* author of The Violence of the Morning