Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now

A writer takes a minute for a closer look

recent posts

Category: reviews

  • This time being liked the tale

    I didn’t know when I started reading A Tale for the Time Being that I would like it. Recommended to me by a dancer friend in my Nia community—someone I trust because she is smart, funny and kind—the book began slowly, but I warmed to it, became intrigued and then mesmerized and then had to…

  • Hard kind of love, also joy

    As I read Kathy Watson’s compelling memoir Last Morning at Nora’s Table, I found myself thinking about Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. Both books hinge on a shocking death, but Watson’s story is, for me, the more powerful. Watson starts the memoir in the kitchen of her first restaurant, then reveals in well-structured…

  • Marge Piercy’s poetic heart still keeping good time

    Of course I would read The Hour of My Death, the newest and possibly final work by Marge Piercy. Her 1980 collection of poetry The Moon Is Always Female is the single thing my first lover gave me that I kept after that relationship went down in flames. I still have it. The yearlong journal…