Kibbe
Poems by Susan Azar Porterfield
Susan
Azar Porterfield movingly portrays the seeking of cultural roots in Lebanon
and in her father’s former village of Kousba. What she offers is no less
than a thrilling narrative of how we come to love the world, even among
maimings, wars, and threats of translated confusions. These poems are
political in the deepest sense—they thin the membrane between personal
and public, demonstrating with clarity, grace, and even restraint, the
reciprocity between one’s interior map and boundaries drawn in ink or
blood. “The old country. No one says that now,” she writes.
The “old country” for her is necessarily the new, and the new, the old.
It’s Azar Porterfield’s profound love of place that grounds these poems
in the viscera, where we are tender and most alive. Acknowledging her
heritage, she says in “Chicago Love Poem,” “If I’d written Your eyes
are two palm groves / at the hour of dawn, / the palms would be
roots in my bones.” Still, you can’t remove from her the city of her
birth: “I was born in Chicago, and this is what I know: / That without
you, I’m a platform of the El / wind-iced at 3:00 a.m. / That together
we’re a convertible ride / along Lakeshore Drive in June.” These poems
are thick with the thinning of distance not only between cultures but
between this and that, I and Thou, and self and other. The locus of transformation
is the primacy of love.
—George Kalamaras
Kibbe by Susan Azar Porterfield
Mayapple Press
Publication Date: January 15, 2012
Price: $13.95
Paperback
ISBN 978-1-936419-08-1
www.mayapplepress.com