It's Good Weather for Fudge

Walker shows expert knowledge of McCullers's canon but diffuses the literary journey with pleasant inroads into the life of the author. Fans of McCullers’s works will want this essential companion piece.

* Mountain Times *

It’s Good Weather for Fudge is a brilliantly executed apostrophe in which Sue Walker addresses Carson McCullers as one Southern woman to another, but always in a poetic fashion that delights. I love the way Walker mingles their experiences as Southern women, even the way she objects to McCullers being buried in the North when every Source one should know that her body and soul belong to the South.

* author of The Old Stoic Faces in the Mirror: A Life in Poems *

Sue Walker's masterful book-length poem—moving freely between lyrical biography and aesthetic meditation—is precisely what we need to help us rediscover, reaffirm the extraordinary life and work of Carson McCullers. In these elegant, searching lines, history becomes celebration and confession becomes artistic triumph. There are two essential Southern voices here. And, as this book is a stunning achievement, we can be grateful for both.

* author of Threading Stone and Seven Dreams of Falling *

The life and work of Carson McCullers—her painful longing, her struggle with her damaged body—echoes in Sue Walker’s imaginative long-form poem, It’s Good Weather for Fudge. Walker’s writing is lyrical, narrative, scholarly, and wise. She identifies with McCullers—both growing up in the South, both studying music, both poets and writers—and then moves beyond her, making a call for fortitude while accepting the impossibility of love, willing the lost hunter’s bones home to the South. A remarkable poem.

* author of A Swift Passage *

I'm over the moon about this book. It loves you, through its language and depth and daring. Witty, sensual, defiant, celebratory! Don't let the fun fool you. The interweaving of texts makes me think of Eliot's 'Waste Land' technique—here made more accessible, womanized, personalized, and astute about being and nonbeing, time and place, like Virginia Woolf. This is a brilliant book that knows no borders. Go there/come in ... in ... in.

* author of Ahab's Wife and Four Spirits *

A single book-length poem has to be well-written to maintain the reader's interest. This is one of those books. A child of the South growing up in the 1940s and 1950s will experience flashbacks through poignant memories of a time now gone. A reader's treat!

* Gwinnett For