Live Encounters Books-Reviews Volume Seven
November- December 2025
Voice/Poems by Susan Azar Porterfield
Trio House Press, 2025
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.”
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Susan Azar Porterfield is a master of restraint… through her speakers, she offers us meditations on family, loss, and presents us with the beauty of her lush mind.
— Zeeshan Pathan, author of
The Minister of Disturbances
“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.”
— Janine Certo, author of
O Body of Bliss
“Porterfield writes intelligently and surrealistically…with strong imagery and inventive language…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
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, Barrow Street, Mid-American Review, Rhino, Poetry Ireland Review, Slipstream, and more. 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.