Dear Traveler

Susan Suntree powerfully adds her work to the travel poem traditions of her Classical Japanese predecessors, Saigyo and Basho. Dear Traveler is a Postmodern travel diary taking us on a journey through "a fevered civilization." These poems shine with moments of quiet astonishment as they guide us into the interior of the self during these turbulent times. Her poems remind us "Your wild life is listening."

-Alan Soldofsky, author of In the Buddha Factory and Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing, San Jose State University



Dear Traveler is a gorgeous poem-cycle as well as a journey we all must make.

-Marsha de la O, author of Every Ravening Thing



There is a silence at the heart of all things. It is part of the miracle of this world in all its wondrous detail and sometimes frightening potential as each of us travels the landscape of what the zen tradition refers to as the great matter of birth-and-death. The poems in Susan Suntree's Dear Traveler are true and gifted companions of this journey; they emerge from the poet's years of deep listening as she made her way on this traceless path, and leave their echo in the reader's heart. But there is something more here for you to discover; in some mysterious way, Suntree's poetry itself listens. It listens without ears, and speaks without a mouth.

-Peter Levitt, author of One Hundred Butterflies, Within Within, translator (with Kazuaki Tanahashi) The Complete Cold Mountain: Poems of the Legendary Hermit Hanshan



Like the music of the tall grass and dry sticks that Susan Suntree writes about, these poems sing. Her writing here is spare, her economy of language admirable; there's not an extraneous word or piece of punctuation anywhere. Each tiny poem floods dark corners with light. Tight as a coiled spring, these pieces test the limits of compression. Each is a jewel.

-Jana Harris, author of Horses Never Lie About Love (memoir) and You Haven't Asked About My Wedding or What I Wore (poetry)