Böcker av Susan Stevens

In the spirit of Kierkegaard and his adherents, these poems emphasize the power and opportunity of solitude and the virtue of living alone without being flagrantly antisocial. There is virtue in partners keeping distance so as to avoid envelopment--and to spur creativity and contemplation. "Too much of a good thing" characterizes the plight of many marriages; keeping the desirable, provocative tension between people may be a coextension of less, not more, nearness.

The poems in Things We Might Miss play with two main aspects of missing: experiencing loss (or being deprived), and failing to see-aspects echoed in, respectively, the book's front and back cover photos. But instead of seeing missing as altogether negative, the book praises it in one's affections as desirable-for example, it's arguably a good thing to be able to miss someone, and disagreeable to find a person's constant presence a form of browbeating, or a state where "respect fades/in obliged nearness/into a sort of stupor." Accordingly, these poems reiterate how absence can and should be alluring. The themes of distance and positive tension between people pick up on Kierkegaard's caution on total familiarity, as well as author Philip Wylie's complaint, "That's the trouble with love. People think it involves rights."

The poems in O, But in the Library suggest desirable restraints in amorous and friendly relationships between partners to avoid domination, absolute uniformity, complacency, and loss of privacy and intrigue. In this principle, one's approach or withdrawal to a comfortable measure of intimacy-avoiding both envelopment and remoteness-produces a positive tension that is esteemed in these poems.