After you died
I dreamed we were
floating far above
the earth
your arm
around my waist.
I looked back at it.
You were looking
the other way.
When I woke
the imprint of your arm
still lingered.
ISBN 1-59661-144-8
139 pages/$9
From Rain Taxi, Volume 10, No. 5, Fall 2005
These poems are the work of a sensitive, highly observant young-old soul, with a deep empathy with the past and a guarded sense of anxiety about how she fits into history's sweep...Nostrand's voice is perfectly calibrated to convey the haunting mood of loss that characterizes the volume.
"A moment ago/this was a simple conversation," Sudie Nostrand writes in her exquisite new collection Variations. Nostrand shows us how a relationship can reveal the world, the seasons, even the kindness of bystanders, everything but the deepening mystery of the other person. Nostrand's taut lines have the complexity of silence, and her book is poised between haiku and epic, between plenitude and a searing absence.
--D. Nurkse,
author of The Fall, Burnt Island, and The Border Kingdom
A halting. A ballet of gesture so undemanding it
becomes hypnotic in slow motion magnitude.
A mesmerizing clarity of disclosure.
In Sudie Nostrand’s Variations, language is a Force of Nature.
Scenes radiating passion electrify a constant. Atmosphere quivers.
--Maureen Owen,
author of (among many others) American rush: selected poems, Erosion's Pull, and AE, her biography of Amelia Earhart, which won the American Book Award
If history does, in fact, repeat itself, then Sudie Nostrand is Emily Dickenson; at least figuratively. If the "Him" in Emily Dickenson's poems is both real and transcendent, then so, too, are the variations of "Him" in Nostrand's. Sudie's work has always dealt with the overlays of time and space--she sees through them, layer by layer, and the historical events in each are absolutely coterminous to her--thus the male objects of her attention, though they exist in the present, have an timeless quality; they are frozen forever in her sharply etched portraits.
--Ron Kolm,
co-author of Neo Phobe,
editor of The Worst Book I Ever Read
Sudie Nostrand recently received First Prize for the best two poems published in the Birmingham Poetry Review. She publishes regularly in such journals as the California Quarterly and The Greensboro Review. Her first book, The Paris Poems, was published by March Street Press. Her work is archived in the Fales Collection at the New York University Library.