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FROM SUFFERING TO SALVE by Suzan E. Zan

FROM SUFFERING TO SALVE

My Journey To Happiness

by Suzan E. Zan

Pub Date: Jan. 24th, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-94-753604-3
Publisher: Turtle Cove Press

A personal book of poems about overcoming adversity and rediscovering oneself.

This collection focuses on themes of metamorphosis. The first section, “Suffering,” opens with “Weathering the Storm Another Day,” a poem about a contentious relationship in which the speaker refuses to participate anymore. “Cut the Power” describes an effort to leave the past behind and begin again with a clean slate. The speaker of “Gray Is a Warning To Heed” metaphorically evicts a toxic person from their being, and another wrestles with isolation in “Loneliness Called, She Wants You Back.” Zan employs a baseball metaphor to describe a failure at love and a willingness to try again in “Divorce, America’s Favorite Pastime.” A classmate who killed herself is the subject of “Sharing Aloneness With Willa.” The “Scars” section kicks off with “I Became From Where I Am,” a poem about identity and family. In the “Salve” section, the speakers experience a sort of rebirth, reuniting with friends, experimenting with makeup, basking in nature, and opening up to love again. The poet ends the collection on an uplifting note—joyful, determined, and “braving a future unknown.” Zan chooses her words carefully, using vibrant verbs and sensual adjectives, as when she describes how a speaker’s “skin singes,” the “bourbon-orange glow of the sun,” the “velvety / warmth” of coffee, or an embrace “enclosing me like a / weighted blanket.” She also shows a brave vulnerability; the speaker of “10 Truths: If I’m Being Honest,” for example, unleashes a slew of unflattering confessions, including a desire to be anorexic, a contemplation of suicide, and a wish that a husband was dead. Another work, “There Lived a Girl on Birch Lane,” takes on the perspective of a teen who gave up a child for adoption as it explores a theme of abandonment. But the book occasionally veers into melodramatic territory in self-pitying stanzas such as “No one sees / how do I start? / to describe the pain / of my folded heart.” There are a few clichéd similes, as well, including “I savored you like a filet mignon.”

A sometimes-insightful, if slightly uneven, collection that catalogs a journey from devastation to renewal.