False Borders

Sue Budin's False Borders insightfully addresses the question of boundaries-real, imagined, shared, or held close-fisted. Where are our borders when the air we breathe out someone else inhales? When "hungry children hide in the gathers of their mothers' skirts," and "everywhere, there are rumblings, invisible vibrations-in the city's streets." These sensitive poems form an intelligent jigsaw, personal and public, that interlock, yet leave room for the ineffable to sneak in and surprise us. Sit back, immerse yourself in this intelligent collection, and do as Budin suggests in her concluding poem "you with silver wings-stray off the path."
-Shutta Crum, author of When You Get Here and The Way to the River, as well as thirteen books for younger readers.

In False Borders, Sue Budin gives us the honest poetry we want and need in our divided times. She asks us to breathe together as one, to erase designated boundaries, to look at what remains incomplete. Throughout, Sue sees the rubble, the one-armed doll, the child missing a leg, knows how hard it is to know where one thing begins and the other ends. Sue gathers threads and touches sacred cloth, sees the light shimmer through the broken, says if only we could listen, sees the finish line where we step over borders. We put our trust in her, breathe the same air between sea and sky, grateful for this beautiful book.
-Chris Lord, author of Field Guide to Luck and What We Leave, founder of Word'n Woman Press.

In False Borders, Sue Budin explores a world where despair and celebration live together, where a color is "illegal" and news about outer space awakens human emotions. Many poems display the poet's keen sensibility to art, and her ekphrastic poems draw on everything from the Blues to Breugel. Rather than the perfect, the poet seeks the hole, the ravel, the empty space. She collages the observed with the remembered or imagined. With light and shadow, line and contour, color and tone-as well as wit-these poems break the rules, question the usual, and juxtapose the disparate. Reading them, we join her in this transformation of the faded, torn, or broken into something beautiful.
-Marilyn Churchill, author of Memory Stones.