Breathing Under Water

By Susan Bright

(and friends)

This is what poetry must be if it is to play a part in the future of American artistic expression. With Breathing Under Water we dip into the spirit of community -- all its laughter, its tears, its promise and fears, all its crazy post modern complexity. We already knew that Barton Springs is the heart of Austin. Now we know Susan Bright and her swimming companions -- past present and future -- are the secret angels of Austin's soul who in their daily dedication to those cold waters invite us to dive into the waters of the community itself. Join them in that narrow emerald place that bears so gracefully the weight of our collective dreams.

Ric Williams, Austin Chronicle

Passionate and mysterious, Breathing Under Water offers such wonderful characters, such a profound appreciation of place, and such significance of joy that to read it is to plunge into a medium of transformation. Beautiful.

Betty Sue Flowers, Poet, editor and director of the Creative Writing Program, Department of English, UT at Austin

If anyone can breathe under water, my choice to do it would be Susan Bright. She would display her flippers, swim off silkily, adapted as the dolphin to breathe the liquid cool. Her laughter would echo against the stones, while through the spray a beautiful rainbow shimmers, opening new doors of mind and heart as she lives day by day. No matter what comes in, no matter what or where the adventure, problem, struggle, circumstance -- she swims in gliding form, toggling the gears of the universe to the flow of Barton Springs.

Peggy Lynch, Poet, Founder of Poetry in the Arts

Breathing Under Water celebrates the beauty and laments the degradation of Barton Springs, a precious, fragile marriage of geology and culture, something singular and irreproducible, a place that is only here, now, and in Austin. By including the voices of many lovers of the springs, particularly the year-round swimmers, Bright has produced a collection of poetry that is at once deeply intimate and politically committed.

John Herndon, Poet, Columnist, Austin American Statesman

ISBN:1-891386-17-4, 96 pgs, $14.95