Next to the Last Word

By Susan Bright

The "Dark Lady" cycle allows the nameless woman Shakespeare wrote about to speak. She time-travels, is a universal witness whose wise cracks snap at the human condition. Pure invention, she lives in Elizabethan England, contemporary Detroit, Calcutta or downtown Austin. "Five hundred years on this planet and her story doesn't end." (Eve La Salle Caram, novelist, professor, The Writer's Program, UCLA Extension)

"Inside Time" is a series of performance pieces and tirades, poems about what happens to us, to the people we love, to the planet. "There Is a Rip in Me" is a long tirade in which all of civilization pours through a woman swimming up the River Thames.

"Everything that is in the world or has been in the world is fair game because alive. And that is perhaps the most important thing about these poems: They are alive." (Faye Kicknowsway, poet, professor, Univ. of Hawaii)

Bright's slant on art and the world is uniquely shaped by the fact that she is both a performing poet and the editor and publisher of more than a hundred books by other poets. Her poems about the history of bookmaking, ancient illuminators, libraries, scribes, advertisements and commerce explore the process so that "Print" becomes itself the subject of art. ". . . a seeing that won't let the last word in edgewise." (Craig Czury, Poet-in-Schools, PA)

About the Author

Susan Bright is the author of seventeen books of poetry, three of which ("Far Side of the Word," "Tirades And Evidence Of Grace" and "House of the Mother") have been recipients of Austin Book Awards. "Tirades And Evidence Of Grace" also won the Violet Crown Award. She is the editor of Plain View Press which since 1975 has published one-hundred-and-nine books. Her work as a poet, publisher, activist and educator has taken her all over the United States and abroad. In Texas she has received a proclamation from the Senate honoring her literary and community work, and in Austin she received the Woman of the Year Award in 1990 from the Women's Political Caucus. She is a year around lap swimmer at Barton Springs Pool in Austin, Texas.
156 pgs, $14.95, ISBN: 1-891386-04-2

[PA, IL, TX, Women's Studies, Women's Lit., Midwest, Education, Poetry, Oral Interpretation]