Suzanne Cleary’s The Odds is about chance: crazy luck, bad luck, about the luck of the draw, and what we make of that draw. Through arresting imagery and surprising turns, these narrative and contemplative poems examine the work of holding a job, of making art, of making sense of our historical moment. There is mortality and there is humor. There are references from Angie Dickinson to Edward Elgar. Cleary, MFAW ’79, is a poet for whom everything feels, sometimes against the odds, connected.
Recently selected by Jan Beatty as winner of the Laura Boss Narrative Poetry Award, The Odds is Cleary’s fifth book of poetry. Other works include Crude Angel, her fourth full-length poetry collection, published in November 2018 by BkMk Press (U of Missouri-Kansas City). Beauty Mark (BkMk 2013) won the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry, and also received the Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize and the Patterson Award for Literary Excellence. Keeping Time (2002) and Trick Pear (2007) were published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. Poets Marilyn Nelson and Robert Cording selected her collection Blue Cloth as winner of the 2004 Sunken Garden Poetry Festival chapbook competition.
About the author
Cleary’s national awards include a Pushcart Prize and the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America, and residencies at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. Her poems have appeared in anthologies including Best American Poetry, Poetry 180, Don’t Leave Hungry: Fifty Years of Southern Poetry Review, and From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems That Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great. Her poems have appeared in journals including Atlantic Monthly, Georgia Review, Southern Review, and Poetry London.
She teaches as Core Faculty in the in the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing Program of Converse University in Spartanburg, South Carolina. In addition to being in the first MFA graduating class in Creative Writing from WashU, she holds a bachelor’s degree in history from SUNY Oneonta and a PhD in Literature and Criticism from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. A New York City-area resident for more than 30 years, Cleary was born and raised in Binghamton, New York. Her website is suzanneclearypoet.com.