Susan Elbe is the author of Eden in the Rearview Mirror (Word Press), which won Honorable Mention for the Council for Wisconsin Writers Posner Poetry Book Award, and two chapbooks, Light Made from Nothing (Parallel Press) and Where Good Swimmers Drown (Concrete Wolf Press, 2012). Her poems appear or are forthcoming in many journals and anthologies, including Blackbird, Diode, Nimrod, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, qarrtsiluni, Salt Hill, A Fierce Brightness: Twenty-five Years of Women’s Poetry (Calyx Books), Fire On Her Tongue: An eBook Anthology of Contemporary Women’s Poetry (Two Sylvias Press), A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poems (University of Akron Press), and City of the Big Shoulders: An Anthology of Chicago Poems (University of Iowa Press). Among her awards are the 2011 Concrete Wolf Poetry Chapbook Prize, the inaugural Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize (Calyx), the Council for Wisconsin Writers Lorine Niedecker Award, Third Place in the Poetry Center of Chicago’s 14th Annual Juried Reading, and fellowships to Vermont Studio Center and Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

Other poems by Susan Elbe in Verse Daily:
October 12, 2012:   "Once Not, Now Broken" "Before you ask about my lightning mouth..."
April 12, 2008:   "Scheherazade" "Another night washes up at my feet..."
February 5, 2006:   "Perseveration" " All the road rage, rolling blackouts..."

Books by Susan Elbe:

Other poems on the web by Susan Elbe:
Two poems
Four poems
Two poems
Two poems
Five poems
Four poems
"Constellations"
"Will Come Back"
Two poems
Two poems

Susan Elbe's Website.

Susan Elbe on Twitter.

About The Map of What Happened:

"Rain from 'a bruised-pear summer sky,' a river's 'cold silver zipper,' and the 'green, sexy smell of water' fill Susan Elbe's sensuous poems in The Map of What Happened. Perhaps, because these poems are silky attempts to defy 'rain, which erases everything' and to recover images of the past in order to recast them. Even a woman hemming dresses for money, maybe an aunt or mother or neighbor, glints with the watery image of a 'fan of silver pins glittering between her lips/ as she knelt on the cold linoleum.' 'I'm the one,' Elbe says, 'whose laugh falls from the bridge,/ the last to run for cover/ when a hard rain pushes us toward home.' Whether the water is memory or tears or erotic danger, it fills these poems, vividly presenting moments of intimate, often exquisite, recovery."
—Diane Wakoski

"Susan Elbe's 'Map' is an elegant work of starkly-hued reminiscence, a love letter to the city that raised her and an unflinching exploration of the littered personal landscape we all must travel. These deftly-crafted stanzas will conjure home for you--wherever that home is, whatever shape it has taken."
—Patricia Smith

"The city itself--Chicago--is a dominant image in Susan Elbe's The Map of What Happened and in some of the poems one can actually hear echoes of Sandburg and an earlier Chicago poetry, a tradition Elbe revitalizes."
—Stuart Dybek