Beauty Mark: poems - Softcover

Poetry. BEAUTY MARK, a poetry collection by Suzanne Cleary, was chosen by Kevin Prufer for the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry. BEAUTY MARK uses images and subjects drawn from American popular culture to find transcendent meanings in the natures of beauty, time, and especially, art-from the beauty mark of Miss Peggy Lee to the flavors in the Cheese-of-the-Month Club. Kevin Prufer writes, "These plainspoken poems are not merely conversational, nor are they in any way simple. Beneath their amiable, glistening surfaces are deep concerns ... mortality, those qualities that define art, and our relationship to the divine." Ilya Kaminsky writes that BEAUTY MARK "bewitches and stuns," and Denise Duhamel calls Cleary "the real deal."

“Suzanne Cleary's Beauty Mark is a lucid, ambitious work that reflects a keen and sensitive mind, her ideas and images gleaned from the sensual, tangible world. She writes, 'nothing lasts forever/except our desire for things to last forever,' but it is this poet's determination to deeply probe her subjects and her ability to sustain the elegant, energetic line that keeps us tied to what shines in each poem's humble discovery.” —Dorianne Laux “Suzanne Cleary's Beauty Mark is gorgeously audacious, tender, vulnerable and open.Her distinctive poems celebrate the quotidian life—the victories and mistakes, the historical and the anecdote. To paraphrase an old Panteen shampoo commercial: Don't hate her because she writes beautiful poems. Suzanne Cleary is the real deal.” —Denise Duhamel “'The imperfect is our paradise,' Wallace Sevens reminds us, but how lucky we are to have in these poems of Suzanne Cleary another reminder. Here is a world where '[d] ancing the polka is like walking/on a ship's deck/ during a storm..../Each time the ship/tilts, you take two hop-like/steps in one direction....' Against the odds, against the elements, the dance. Beauty bedevils, she tells us, but the beauty mark bedevils beauty, and this is exactly what Cleary's lyric voice does in a book that bewitches and stuns.” —Ilya Kaminsky