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Winner of the
Four Way Books Award Series in Poetry
selected by Robert Hass.
"Susan Wheeler's Smokes looks like a book that sets itself the task of continuous invention and surprise... It's like listening to the still chancy and experimental transmission of the post modern vehicle gleefully downshifting into the breezy updrafts of the traditional musics of English verse, and then lurching into the future again. Smokes contains elegies, poems of urban and domestic angst, laments, invectives, cakewalks, struts. It's very much of the moment but it is also a deeply literary book -- how could it not be? And its confident rueful, and playful grasp of its tradition is eye-opening and, sardonic as it is, boisterous fun."
--Robert Hass
About the author
SUSAN WHEELER is on the faculty of the MFA program in creative writing at The New School for Social Research. She lives in New York City. She has received a Pushcart Prize and two fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts; her first poetry collection, Bag 'o' Diamonds (Georgia, 1993) was chosen by James Tate to receive the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and was shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Poetry.
