The fly couldn’t holdbut buzzed and flailedon my kitchen floor,its wires throwing lost signalsthe way a phone ringsunanswered in a room.Its sensilla retained the dust of a grapeas you must surely feel the last sweet airbefore reaching the pointwhere the brain unplugs its loveand looks sideways.
Sister in a Coma
Suzanne Underwood Rhodes
Feature Date
- July 19, 2022
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“Sister in a Coma” from Flying Yellow by Suzanne Underwood Rhodes.
Copyright 2021 by Suzanne Underwood Rhodes.
Used by permission of Paraclete Press.
A native of New York, Suzanne Underwood Rhodes is the poet laureate of Arkansas, appointed for a four-year term in 2022. She’s the author of Flying Yellow, named a semi-finalist in the 2022 North American Book Award of the Poetry Society of Virginia. Other books are What a Light Thing, This Stone; two chapbooks, Hungry Foxes and Weather of the House, and two books of lyrical prose, A Welcome Shore and Sketches of Home. Her poems have appeared in many journals, books, and anthologies such as Mid/South Anthology, Shenandoah, Image, Alaska Quarterly Review, Christian Century, Words and Quilts, and others. Awards include nominations for the Pushcart prize, first place in the Dr. Lily Peter Memorial Award, first place in the Virginia Highlands Creative Writing Contest, and others. A retired college professor, she currently teaches virtual poetry workshops through the Muse Writers Center in Norfolk, Virginia, and has a writing and editing business.
“Reader, beware, for Flying Yellow is not an easy path to follow. That’s because these poems are, thankfully, nothing like the flat, prosaic landscape disguised as poetry today. Rhodes’s is a deeply spiritual terrain, a book of many journeys with a voice who leads us like Dante’s, meeting us in the deep woods ‘with no way to know [what] will lead us out.’ In these dark times, these poems of journey and survival are the ‘flying yellow’ day we need.”
—Bruce Guernsey, author of From Rain: Poems 1970-2010
“This is one of the richest poetry collections I have read in a long time. Here are the intense images of a 1960s childhood, vivid narratives of family stresses and joys, and a panoply of voices—from colonial American women to a very pregnant Mary. These poems excite the spirit with revelations of the holy that one encounters in the most unlikely places, which of course is where the holy often appears.”
—Jill Peláez Baumgaertner, Poetry Editor, Christian Century
“I have been reading and returning to Suzanne Underwood Rhodes's poems for twenty-five years—as bulwark, as shelter, for their attentiveness to the beauties of language, for their persistent opening into grace—and now comes Flying Yellow, like a gift from a wise friend that arrives when most needed. Rhodes is at the height of her strength here, life-affirming, generous, and precise, a voice with work to do in the world and in the spirit.”
—James Owens, poet, author of Mortalia
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