The pages in Milwaukee poet Sarah Rosenblatt’s third book, just published by Carnegie Mellon University Press, began in streams of consciousness. “I just write in my notebooks for an hour and a half—write, write, write. When the notebook is full, I’ll go back and put my editorial cap on.”
The resulting right brain-left brain collaboration, Where Are We in This Story?, is a collection of highly personal poems, intensely felt and illustrated by the author’s mother, the respected Milwaukee artist Suzanne Rosenblatt. A fourth volume for Carnegie Mellon is already in gestation. “They really love my work,” Rosenblatt says. “They’re a press that once they like someone, they want to keep on publishing them.”
UW-Milwaukee English professor Susan Firer has been a prolific poet whose verse finds the universal in the personal. The author of Milwaukee Does Strange Things to People and The Lives of the Saints and Everything returns with The Transit of Venus from The Backwaters Press. Her new poems are characterized by humor, literary references and strong images. Telling line: “Death is like Russia: beautiful, cold, expansive, expensive.”
Rosenblatt appears at 7 p.m., Nov. 4 and Firer at 7 p.m., Nov. 3 at Boswell Book Co.
