Susan Bradley Smith

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Biographical note:  Susan Bradley Smith began her writing life as a music and theatre journalist in Sydney and later London. Since then she has published extensively as a theatre and literary historian. Her first collection of poems, Marmalade Exile, was described as ‘Plath unleashed’. She lives at the beach with her husband and three of their children, and teaches in the English Department at La Trobe University, Melbourne.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844714490
ISBN:  9781844714490
Author:  Susan Bradley Smith
Title:  Supermodernprayerbook
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Sep-10
Extent:  112pp
Height:  198 mm
Width:  129 mm
Thickness:  6 mm
Weight:  168 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 9.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  This collection is what everyone needs for modern life, a contemporary prayer book. Buy it and use it as a footprint for walking through each day, safe in the rhythms of each and every poem and the common denominator of hope they contain within.

Main description:  This collection is what everyone needs for modern life, a contemporary prayer book. Buy it and use it as a footprint for walking through each day, safe in the rhythms of each and every poem and the common denominator of hope they contain within. These poems audit modern day dilemmas ranging from suburban dreaming to how to barter with the devil, and why choosing the right thing to wish for in life is imperative, with consequences for bad decisions being neverbloodyending. Despite the horror of love and failures that this collection documents, each poem is an ‘amen’ to life, a source of comfort, and a prayer for protection from the woes of every day life. Read it, weep, then put on a pair of those boots that are meant for walking: you’ll never feel better.

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Unpublished endorsement:  This is a really supermodern account of the tribulations of women’s love and life, all written in a racy, engaging and witty style which rolls off the page at supermodern pace. It’s supermodern because it’s right in the moment, not post or ante quo, and it’s a prayer book because it is like the prophets of old: lamentations and celebrations of the meaning of life. It’s wry and dramatic with a wonderful sense of personal presence in a voice which lives in the moment. These are great pieces for performance, and for reflection. They are also forceful exercises in the creation of a compelling subjectivity. The language fizzes, and mood changes like a four-season day — playful despair is the key-note. Both serious and jokey this is the most entertaining (and shocking) book of poetry I’ve read in twelve months.

Julian Croft

Unpublished endorsement:  These poems are full of an orgasmic immediacy that one is taken in straight away and swallowed up, carried away by its poetic eloquence akin to a female vibrator working hard into the dark recesses of the human heart, with the tenderest of feelings.

Ouyang Yu

Unpublished endorsement:  Susan Bradley Smith offers up a bracing theatre of the real, a poetry of questing, of desiring, that is unflinching in its examination of intimacy and betrayal. Her voices move between doubt and hope, a form of call and response, as they negotiate the global mileage of new century relationships, of births, loves and transgressions, and deaths. Her invocation of the idea of prayer itself is both provocative and playful. Here are unorthodox ways of refiguring petition, comfort, confession, forgiveness. If prayer is a matter of breath, then these poems exuberantly breathe through many forms, from lines of one word gasps to longer inhalations of prose poetry. And through it all Bradley Smith never shirks, she keeps it real.

Jill Jones