Cloud Pharmacy

White Pine Press, 2014

“Susan Rich’s Cloud Pharmacy is a marvel of a book! Her poetry is an exuberant exploration of a life in love and in longing: tilt-a-whirls, pineapple rings, and small cartons of milk alert us to enlivened possibilities of nostalgia and desire.” – Aimee Nezhukumatathil

“At times surreal, often leavened with a wry black humor, echoing Elizabeth Bishop, these poems create an “ecstatic theology” in which ambivalence–does this passionate heady speaker want to live “jig-sawed together” or “lonely as brooms”?–is both song and argument.” – Catherine Barnett

“In Cloud Pharmacy, Susan Rich transforms unease into beauty—sensual and marvelously conflicted and nuanced poems of romantic love, memory, and identity. These poems weigh the gorgeous evidence but never offer simple decisions. The recurring image of an encroaching wildfire never lets them rest. In a central sequence of completely original poems, Rich explores nineteenth-century photographer Hannah Maynard’s proto-surrealistic images, looking in grief-heavy places for revelation. The result is wonderfully strange and unsettling; this is Rich’s most haunting collection yet.” – Kathleen Flenniken