The Heart’s Pangaea

Susan Neale

“’Everywhere we have been since beginning/Is Mapped in the memory somewhere,’ writes Susan Neale at the outset of this ambitiously conceived and enormously satisfying collection of poems.  Here is a poet who wants nothing less than to know the past.  Her fields of study are the history of light and darkness, of language and other ways of saying, of reality and dream, and, especially, of women and men as they move toward one another and away in their seismic, often cataclysmic dancing, a continental rift and drift originating in a long-ago state of innocence and wholeness Neal calls ‘the heart’s Pangaea.’  In this debut  collection sure to attract wide attention, Susan Neale gives us richly detailed maps leading to discoveries about where we human beings have been, where we are, and where in the world, together and apart, we’re bound.”—David Citino