Wildlife

I meant to post this yesterday… it is the season for windfalls so here is one for you from Mid Wales, appropriate to our journeying yesterday. Windfalls is out now through Parthian.

NEWSFLASH! I have been booked to do a real life gig. I'll be joining Patrick jones on the stage at Crickhowell Literary Festival on Saturday 16 October at 6pm. Do come along! Patrick Jones and Susie Wild – Fuse, Fracture and Windfalls Patrick Jones has been a significant voice in Welsh poetry for twenty-five years. In this new edition of Fuse Fracture he engages with the energy and passion that has made his work stand out. Susie Wild's second collection Windfalls are tales from unexpected events, funny, perceptive and sometimes wild. Book tickets on eventbrite

  125 years ago today Mademoiselle Albertina's body was found near Nash. Her grave in the local cemetery called to me on a walk this week, pulling me a different route round – through conservation woodland onto a grassy, bramble-lined path, curving past the first blackened berries tart to taste. And then, there she was, the freshly cleaned headstone gleaming white in the heatwave sun.  Here's my poem about her from my new collection Windfalls , out now through Parthian Books :

Caroline Bracken reviews Windfalls for Nation.Cymru, I think she liked it....  'The word ‘windfall’ reminds me of Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘A Kite for Aibhín’ which ends or lands on that magical word. While they are very different poets, Susie Wild has something of Heaney’s lyric sensibility, an ability to capture a moment others might pass by [...] The love poems in the second section of the book are some of the strongest, gorgeous, unsentimental portraits, ‘He was a cupped hand/ to the cigarettes she’d quit// but taken up again’ (‘Everyone Got Married’) [...] Pandemic poems are a new popular phenomenon but I challenge anyone to write a better one than Susie Wild’s ‘How quickly we forget to live.’ I'm in good company too with collections by Dai George and Ilse Pedler also reviewed. Read the article in full on Nation.Cymru

Parthian Books say ' It's a special deal on some VERY special poetry!'   So it must be ;) For a limited time you can buy this bundle of three BRILLIANT collections for £15! (original price: £27.99): Small by  Natalie Ann Holborow How to Carry Fire by Christina Thatcher Windfalls by  Susie Wild (OR there's a code for £3 off each title bought separately!) Ends midday Tuesday. ENJOY! Order here:  https://www.parthianbooks.com/collections/recommended-poetry/products/parthian-new-poetry-bundle

I can’t listen back to myself on the radio etc! But you can... Here I am talking about my new poetry collection Windfalls on Penarth Sounds, available now from Parthian and all your favourite bookshops! https://www.mixcloud.com/penarthsounds/writers-on-reading-episode-46/

You can now watch this lovely event held last week celebrating the release of Susie Wild's new collection Windfalls , hosted by editor and poet Zoë Brigley Thompson. Diolch to all who came along! https://youtu.be/LQDcbvppPpo

  ‘Her poems are beautiful, even when tackling difficult subjects, and arresting without feeling over-ornamented or inflated. Above all, they shine with authenticity - perhaps because she has a magpie’s appetite for glimpsed moments...’ – Jenny White I’m in the Western Mail today promoting Windfalls . Out now from Parthian Books !

The first review of Windfalls is in, thanks Mab Jones and Buzz Magazine ! Rather pleased to have been compared to Jean Rhys. 'The word used for its title makes this collection instantly intriguing. It can mean both fruit blown down in the wind, or a large amount of money received unexpectedly. However, the reader isn’t given a sense, here, of such lottery-like good luck. Where windfalls are specifically mentioned, they belong to other people – to those who don’t realise their abundant good fortune. 'In one poem they are “next door’s apples”; in a later poem, those same apples “are still there – / the windfalls, rotting / in garden waste bags”. Other people have their inherited trees full of fruit but, not being gifted such, Wild’s windfalls are of the everyday – of its physical intimacies, its domestic pleasures, and of simply being alive despite life’s many challenges and setbacks. 'With its series of poems about boyfriends and lovers past, against a backdrop of bars and ...

Join us for the online launch of Windfalls , the new poetry collection from Susie Wild. Readings & Q&A hosted by poet and editor Zoë Brigley. 12 May 7pm UK 2pm Eastern Time (US and Canada) ‘Powerful, beautifully crafted poems... there’s nothing like poetry to cut down the spaces between us, to leap across gaps, make a friend of a stranger.’ – Jonathan Edwards Book your free tickets here and a Zoom link will be sent shortly before the event: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/susie-wild-launch-of-windfalls-tickets-152623816945

 Thanks to Peter Dareth Evans for these:

Exciting delivery! Windfalls exists! And was, typically, difficult to unpack! Available to pre-order from Parthian and out on 1 May 2021 . Read more to see the unboxing video.  

  ‘“A chase of messages illuminates my screen/through the small hours.” So begins Susie Wild’s new collection, and among things that are fascinating here are the messages these powerful, beautifully crafted poems bring us. From an interaction with a violent taxi driver to the experiences of a mistreated mother to a “whirlwind love” for a husband, this collection understands the power of lyric poetry to bring us real and raucous life. The poems are endlessly engaging, individually and in the ability of the writer to create sequences and consider the emotional arc of a collection. I’m reminded how now, more than ever, there’s nothing like poetry to cut down the spaces between us, to leap across gaps, make a friend of a stranger. Just as, in 'The Starfish,' there’s a commitment to “slowly … fix the broken things,” so these poems show us, again and again, how something of the greatest importance can be crafted from the chaos that life does.’ – Jonathan Edwards Out 1 May 2021. Avail...

Hosted by  Parthian Books  Editor and poet Susie Wild, we see Natalie Ann Holborow and Mari Ellis Dunning stir together myth, legend, fairytale and iconic female characters to cast a book-length spell and bewitch, as well as beguile, the reader. With intelligence and imagination they question stereotypes, delve into archetypes, and dissect what we think we know, transmuting old stories, through gorgeous language and idiosyncratic imagery, into new and startling tales, in 'The Wrong Side of the Looking Glass'. Tickets:  http://bit.ly/SCPFEV7

You can now listen to the audio of my poem 'It's 4:30 in the afternoon again, dear' from my forthcoming new poetry collection Windfalls on The Cardiff Review's SoundCloud 

Hello lovelies! I hope you are keeping well. I'm prepping to record a reading and Q&A with students about my forthcoming book Windfalls and my writing process. I recently enjoyed seeing Kim Addonizio read at an online event for Cheltenham Poetry Festival and I have been revisiting her work. This chimed with me: ‘AS A WRITER occasionally tarred with the brush of being a “confessional poet,” feathered with disdain and once even tied to a maypole by roving bands of critics, I’d like to reveal a few transgressions to you here and now. I hope you will forgive me. I can’t seem to stop telling you everything about me in the lineated memoir of my life. This may be because I’m a woman, which means I am an emotional land mine waiting to be stepped on, a weeping, oversharing harpy whose inner weather fluctuates wildly. And women, as everyone knows, often lack that quality of imagination men have in such abundance. ‘In any case, I clearly have an inordinate, some might say excessive, nee...

Poetry Wales asked me how I write a poem and I sent them a poem in response, which you can listen to and read on their website. It is called 'I Run'

  Hello Lovelies, I hope you have had a lovely festive break! Here's a new poem from me, up on The Cardiff Review today! It is 4:30 in the afternoon again, dear Much 2021 sparkle to you all, Susie Q x

Merry Festive to you all!  Here’s my Poundshop Dec 25th poem based on my first Xmas with the first man I lived with in our first tiny London flat aged 21 ish. We played a lot of travel chess. Brockley Cross Remember when life was at a crossroads? / How Christmas filled our window from October / to February, its tinsel-bright, streetlight level gaze.  / [...] http://www.inksweatandtears.co.uk/pages/?p=23575