Sue Bracken
Alt text: Bracken has long white hair and is smiling while turned slightly toward camera left. She is wearing silver earrings. In the backdrop, there is a sunny image of the outdoors full of green foliage with white and yellow strands of flowers.
Biography
Sue Bracken Poet, partner, mother, sister, former Physiotherapist and Ergonomist, amateur photographer, swimmer. Many of her poems and images deal with water. In a former life she was a fish.
Publications include Angel House Press (NationalPoetryMonth.ca), GUEST [a journal of guest editors], Hart House Review, WEIMAG, The New Quarterly, Another Dysfunctional Cancer Poem Anthology, the Kingston Artfest Anthology More Than a Gathering, and others.
Poetry collections include One Goose Honking, Black Mallard Poetry, winner of the 2024 Starling Award for Poetry; When Centipedes Dream, Tightrope Books 2018; and the chapbook 27, Battleaxe Press forthcoming 2024.
Sue lives and writes in Toronto in a home powered by remarkably talented artists and an intelligent though profusely shedding husky.
Poetics Statement
(Excerpt from the 2024 Starling Award for Poetry Press Release)
“…One Goose Honking is the ideal balance of a maturely told narrative and an insightful series of images, presented with exceptional technical prowess that doesn’t fail to communicate clearly with the reader…”
Andreas Gripp
Editor and Publisher, Black Mallard
Sample of Poet's Work
Honking on the Threshold of Sleep
Winter is the cruelest season
for insomniacs
No longer can we skinny dip
with the midnight geese
or float with the moon’s rippled twin
We’re honking at the threshold of warmth
a blanket jujitsu where no position wins
E-read to triple vision
follow headlights as silent lightning
across the ceiling
These are useless hours
Come dawn I’ll just be stupid
But today!
Today I am saved!!
Today Pantone announced the colour of the year!!!
The gutters of ‘nothing happens’
fill with meaning
all in one colour!!
AI proclaims Viva Magenta 18-1750
as our saving grace
All those previously confusing messages
will now be perfectly clear and pinkish
Everyone in leather
No white after Labour Day
Shorter hair is age appropriate
We insomniacs can now dwell
where blue fades to red
honking at the threshold
of no assigned wavelength
Now we can daydream
of Barbies and bridesmaids and our university selves
all in a magenta fog
Viva la revolution! Viva la dictated colour!
Viva the alarm clock
Honking on the threshold of sleep
JUMP
(“!Warning! Parachuting is a high risk activity which may cause or result
in serious injury or death” Skydive Toronto)
Your first jump mirrored your birth
a drop
into this abyss
on a temporary cord
Somersaults spinning beginnings
on thin fly lines
and looped rainbow silks
So new
you
and the sky
So empty
The beauty of your first freefall
first emptiness
lost to your first mother
leaving
45 seconds of adrenaline
heading straight for the ground
at terminal velocity
The chute unfurls at 6,000 feet
and decades pass
You had a question still on the wing
Government revealed the stark answer
your adoption papers
signed in shadows loops of black ink
the words empty in their fullness
A notice of no contact is in effect
The universe roars its magnitude
We roar our astronomical love
So now the sky
we
and gravity
Pull the cord again
The sky almighty then
Brobdingnagian now
and you are unleashed
landing gear intact
smiling like a maniac
Haliburton December 31st
We stand in the diamonds
framed between the shadows
of two giant pines
that stretch the length of the past year
The lake booms
groans heartbeats
whatever a lake would say
The cracks shout a thunder clap of auld lang syne
We follow it to an intersection
conduct medical experiments
to seal it
Facets flicker
Such beauty in the black and white backdrop
quiet against depth sounding
The night expands to the gateway
If we stay we sink by spring
If we leave we carry the diamonds with us
Our breath – a starred and storied constant
now steam
now exhaust
now new
