“A writer of compassion, urgent acuity, humor, and grit, Suzanne’s new collection showcases her profound connection with the unsung citizens of our unfair world. … Part fever dream, part calm reflection, Face Up is a memoir of a life lived intensely by a writer of her time who wields words both as weapon and medicine.” — Alison McGhee
Endorsements
“Face Up: A Collection of Outlaw Poems is a powerful testimony of survival.
It’s a force to reckon with, deserves to be in any library strong in contemporary poetry and women’s writings, and ideally will assume its place of power in book club discussion circles. There, poetry can take on a new role as a major influence in and focus on living a passionate, rebellious life that eschews the mundane.”
- D. Donovan, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review
“There’s a certain hard-bitten, darkly humorous sort of tone that seems to be unique to St. Paul natives, and Suzanne Nielsen has mastered it. The autobiographical poems in Face Up are thoughtful, assertive and funny, as bracing as a free fall down the Ramsey Street hill without brakes, and as welcome as running into a favorite friend at the end of an eastside bar.”
Andy Sturdevant, Co-Author, Closing Time: Saloons, Taverns, Dives, and Watering Holes of the Twin Cities
“Face Up exists where we live and dream and tell our friends about the harmony and discourse of our days and nights. It is not only what we all should read but what, if we allow it to, reads us.”
Akmed Khalifa, author of The Camel’s Shadow Has Four Humps and City Suite: A Collection of Short Stories
“Suzanne Nielsen’s poems are peopled with wry survivors attending to their lives with purpose and humor. In these poems of tenderness and grit, sorrow is always accompanied by wonder.”
Jacqueline Berger, Author ofThe Gift That Arrives Broken and The Day You Miss Your Exit
“This collection treads a curious step between the edge of Midwestern myth and history, secret profundities and the everyday coffee cups worthy of verse. Strolling through the moonglow, blue noise and questions of true identities and the wisdom of a tree house, this is an ink-stained blast of wonder and inquiry sure to spark delight…”
Bryan Thao Worra, Lao Minnesotan Poet Laureate and Author of DEMONSTRA and Before We Remember We Dream
“While the poems in Face Up don’t shy from the grit—we encounter doomed relationships, PTSD, and addiction—it’s not all hopeless. We empathize with the shattered and become participants. These are poems of a life lived.”
Flower Conroy, Author of The Awful Suicidal Swans and A Sentimental Hairpin
Excerpts (Text & Audio)
Fists for Hands
I was born in the mid-fifties with fists for hands because in utero
I knew life wasn’t fooling around. Last night during my restless hours
I straightened my fingers and cleaned out my desk, a desk from the forties,
where I’d stashed a letter to myself in cursive fifty years earlier.
I inhale the half century and drift back to its drafting under the weeping willow
that my father cut down when I left home. The retreat that bends its branches
for my teenage angst. There I sit, straw hat askew, nose in a book, pad and pencil
my company. We sit and share secrets wrapped in opiates, if you talk,
talk only to yourself because life isn’t fooling around.
Listen to “Fists for Hands:”
Nearsighted Tree
The maple tree in Nessen’s front yard is the color of cranberries,
and just today it shed several of its leaves, some left swirling and
flying into neighbors’ yards, where three children under the age of
ten jump and swing from the rope hanging on the lower branch.
They crash and land and laugh and bury one another beneath
a crimson blanket before it’s time to go inside for supper
and all rest until morning when the tree,
in spite of being nearsighted, casts its
shadow over the backyard, left hushed.
Listen to “Nearsighted Tree:”
Freeze Frame
How many mornings
has the sky warned me
to carry an umbrella
So I married a man
who’d never owned
an umbrella
He’d never owned
a camera. . . . Of course
I didn’t know this
when I met him
I didn’t know this
until four years later
when we were arguing
about the foreboding sky
The sky, too, gives warnings,
I said. He just looked at me
and reached up, grabbed a piece
of that sky and said
this is how close we are to illusions
and this is why I will never
own a camera, an umbrella;
this is why, my dear wife,
meteorological observations
are negatives in a captured frame
that make the sky want to cry.
Listen to “Freeze Frame:”
Pink Plugs
I waited and waited and waited some more until
I went to an audiologist. At sixty years old, I went,
face-to-face
with an audiologist at the Como Clinic.
An audiologist named Seral,
or Stella, or Serial, or Surreal.
I’d paid the price in the ‘70s by hearing
Robert Plant say live at the St. Paul Civic Center,
“St. Paul, you’re much too much.”
But I couldn’t much hear that now, so I went to Seral.
At the Como Clinic in St. Paul. St. Paul, who was struck blind
for three days until surrendering to the Messiah.
Two weeks later I went back to see Seral and to pick up
my hearing aids. I’d bonded with her since our first
introduction while attempting a two-for-one deal
like at the state fair. She didn’t bite, but she did
something far greater.
She swung in from around the corner, gleaming with
anticipation. In her hand was a shiny heart-shaped
box with my aids. She counted to three, uncovered
the box and just as the doctor ordered, there in front
of me were the pinkest My Little Pony pink
metallic plugs a girl could hope for.
Listen to “Pink Plugs:”