Keep and Give Away was selected by Terrance Hayes as the inaugural winner of the South Carolina Poetry Book Prize sponsored by the South Carolina Poetry Initiative. In her first full-length collection, Susan Meyers guides us through her examination of life's ordinary moments and the seemingly ordinary images that abide in them to reveal the extraordinary. From minutia to marriage, crumbs to crows, nothing is too commonplace to escape her attention as she traverses terrains of childhood, loss, relationships, and death. Mostly lyrical and often elegiac, the poems of Keep and Give Away move along the rifts between the past and present, the lived and desired. The dominant emotions of the verses are deepened by observations rooted in our natural world, where birds are "yeses quickening the air" and the sky can "lap you up, and up." In the book's final section, marriage poems turn to fishing and gardening for their truths, contemplations that recognize the realities of a world governed by luck, imperfection, contraries, and-most of all-love.
SUSAN LAUGHTER MEYERS is the author of Keep and Give Away (University of South Carolina Press, 2006), selected by Terrance Hayes for the inaugural South Carolina Poetry Book Prize, which is sponsored by the SC Poetry Initiative. Keep and Give Away also won the 2007 Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance (SIBA) Book Award for Poetry and the North Carolina Poetry Society's Brockman-Campbell Book Award. Her chapbook Lessons in Leaving received the 1998 Persephone Press Book Award, judged by Brendan Galvin. Her poetry has also been published in numerous journals, including The Southern Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Crazyhorse, and jubilat, as well as the online sites Poetry Daily and Verse Daily.
A long-time writing instructor with an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte, Meyers teaches poetry workshops and classes in community programs. She was the 2005 Poet-in-Residence at the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, and she is a past president of the poetry societies of both North and South Carolina. She lives, with her husband, in the rural community of Givhans, South Carolina.
