Susan Jefts

Susan’s full-length poetry collection, Breathing Lessons, published by Shanti Arts Books.

“There is a quiet certainty in Susan’s poetry that reminds me of some of my favorite writers, especially Mary Oliver and Lucille Clifton. It is easy to be in her gently meditative poems, not just as a reader but a fellow observer. The natural world is more than just a setting, or a backdrop, but a felt presence. Breathing Lessons is a book to experience as much as read. You’ll savor the journeys on which it takes you.”

--Joseph Bruchac, author of VOICES OF THE PEOPLE, a collection of biographical poems about notable Native people, with original full color art/

"These poems of receptive presentness under ever-shifting skies convey the twin gifts of intense sensory pleasure and a quiet spirit. One slow exhalation after another, Susan Jefts rediscovers herself on the earth. Each moment encountered here, whether beside a frosty meander of the Hudson or on a Vermont hillside, is a bardo through which life flows in losing and renewing itself."

 --John Elder, author of Imagining the Earth and Reading the Mountains of Home, and former professor at Middlebury College and the Bread Loaf School of English.

By Susan Jefts

It happened on a day I went to the woods, a day I wore my blue scarf, savored an almond muffin and shade-grown coffee. When thought about my conversation with Tay at the café—images of rocks and roots came forth, and a bird in flight. It happened on the day I finished my taxes.

 It happened between one thing and another. A book about the soul, a poem about things—shoes and metal, tobacco smoke, and salt. Many things conspired to tell me the whole story, wrote Neruda, not only those things that leap and climb, desire and survive. A day teeming with things: the rust orange on the chimes, the mailbox’s blue. My book’s fibrous threads, the stone tablets in the park—the way they sing, the way they stay still. Now it seems I can’t say enough about things. How they connect me to a string in my body that binds me to my soul. How every feeling now is a stone or a book, tobacco smoke, or salt.

“A remarkable collection of poems, compelling and deeply felt, unified by the essential rhythm of breath.  You’ll want to read these poems over and over. Susan Jefts’ poems are deeply rooted in the earth—witness to the mystery and the wonder.  She glorifies the natural world as she takes it in and breathes it out, changed, elaborated, celebrated. Jefts touches life’s grace, eloquence and mystery like a relative in a complex, but ultimately beautiful family."   

--Author Life in a Jar: The Irena Sendler Project, Before the Court of Heaven, Poems from the Wilderness, and Entanglements: Physics, love, and wilderness dreams.

“These wise, musical poems with their skillful rhymes and chanting repetitions, offer a wonderful lesson in mindful meditation: embodying mono-no-a-wabi in their appreciation and acceptance that everything is ephemeral. The speaker breathes symbiotically with everything present, finding solace from “the loneliness of a body leaving,” in the “Breath of being, breath of becoming,” in joy that asks us to “Come dance until you can’t./ Dance despite winter, despots, greed, /and losses you never imagined,” in joy as our birthright.”

 --April Ossmann, author of Event Boundaries