Poetry of Susan Engberg > Woodland Pattern Book Center

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Susan Engberg

Award-winning writer Susan Engberg returns with her fourth collection of short stories, Above the Houses (May 2008), a probing series of vignettes which demonstrate her characteristic sensitivity towards and insight into the lives and minds of people and their relations to others. This master at the marriage between intimacies of prose and emotion writes with an economy that both belies and reveals her subjects' startling psychological depth; characters vacillate between exhilaration and despair as they continuously reimagine the truth of such words as love, commitment, and trust, and ponder the private lives of others in an attempt to deal with the sometimes crushing loneliness of their own.

The author of three previous story collections, Susan Engberg has been awarded many prizes and grants, including three appearances in the annual O. Henry Prize Stories. She lives in Milwaukee with her husband, an architect and jazz musician.

[Engberg] "has an uncanny understanding of the darting, itchy paths taken by the introspective mind."
-Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"...all the stories in Susan Engberg's first book, Pastorale, are so good that they could change your life."
-Russell Banks, The New York Times Book Review

from Above the Houses

Susan Engberg

Your fingers test from the smoldering, plum-colored center of impact down to the eyebrow, the swollen lid. It's just a bruise, one more thing. Reaching for your toothbrush, you grimace at your mirrored self: shiner, spiky new haircut, the shocked face of upheaval—in short, a sight.

He appears behind your image. Even now, in his gray sixties, your husband's face is fresh, like a precious child just up from a nap. "My God, what happened to you?"

Two weeks ago, just before the move, he said the same thing about the hair.

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