The poems in Invisible Fish, Susan Glassmeyer’s first full length volume, are remarkable for both their strength and vulnerability, for their insistence that generosity is a choice always available to us, for their defiant love that takes on all comers. Clear-sighted and tender, Glassmeyer’s poems push past our often self-imposed constraints to befriend beings human or animal in all their awkward striving and unmitigated hope. In the unforgettably restrained “On Old Congress Run Road,” in an incident transcribed from Glassmeyer’s own life, the speaker stops traffic and sits down in the midst of a heavily traveled road to shelter a stranger’s dog (“her collar says Bailey”) already struck by two vehicles. Daring to approach the mystery of this world not quite knowing what will be found there, these poems gently embolden us to commit our own acts of courage. We are both relieved and astonished to be reminded that the most responsible organ in the human body is not the head but the heart.

—Annie Stapleton

Poet, Critic, Writing Coach

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We have to take this writer at her word; we have no choice. The integrity in the telling. The consideration of the reader which borders on holy. The elegant and convincing voice. Susan Glassmeyer believes in a world she cannot see—before, during and after life. Poems about the difficult-to-detect, the in-between, the beyond, the forgotten, the dismissed—in the hands of a somatic therapist so in touch with the body and trained to pay utmost attention—keep us grounded so we can take them in. These poems could serve as homilies. They make uncommon sense.

—Valerie Chronis Bickett

Poet, Teacher, Author of Triandafilo

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In her latest work, Invisible Fish, Susan gives form through delicate lyrics and sensitive narratives to the difficult, the beautiful, the unsayable, and even the unimaginable. Her descriptions offer the world as a place to taste and see, an abode of mystery that can be counted on to yield pain, death, wonder, love, and, sometimes, healing. It is through the poetic contours of the positive spaces—things that can be seen and known—that Susan shapes the negative spaces of what cannot be seen or known in this embodied life, but only imagined. There is a mercy here, a gentleness of touch in the depiction of the world as it is that yields a softer vision of it: a place where a thick scar is a strand of pearls; where accidental injury and death yield a still life of wet roses on the pavement; where one can bite the sharp darkness and revolutionize sorrow through the body. One comes away from these intriguing poems with new sight, and isn’t that what poetry is about?

—Claudia Skutar

Poet, Professor University of Cincinnati

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Invisible Fish, Susan Glassmeyer’s first full length collection, is the work of a poet well-versed in what lies beyond sight. Simultaneously, the subject of these exquisite poems is both the process of healing and the knowledge of the core within us which is already and forever whole. “You have to descend from the cloud of knowing / in order for fingers to feel the backbone / of what matters…,” Glassmeyer writes. What matters: a dying dog in the middle of the road  (“I say, Touch her. I say, Don’t be afraid.”); an owl by a public pool, the “soft wild wing of the unexpected”; a woman cradled by her husband to the treatment table, “one branch / of her body a petrified silence”;  a mother who, like the moon, “…placed yourself between / us, risking everything //  so I might rest in the uncommon/ occurrence of your shadow”; a father whose "… fire lives on in me, banked and burning low,/…, a bonfire of words that / glow on these pages.”  We, her readers, are grateful for the light.                                                                   

—Pauletta Hansel

Cincinnati Poet Laureate, 2016-2018

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Filmmaker Federico Fellini was famously quoted: “All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.” This collection of poems holds several strands of such pearls, fashioned by an artist whose penetrating insight is matched by superb craft. Susan Glassmeyer’s Invisible Fish is intimate, healing, startlingly honest and unvarnished. Whether delivered as free verse narratives, as prose poems, in categorized lists or clear tight formal structure, intentional language sparks the heart, mind and muscle of the reader. Even after multiple readings, I gasp, cringe, grin or rejoice, swimming with Invisible Fish, knowing how real they are.

—Bucky Ignatius

Poet, Author of 50/50 Fifty Under Fifty

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There is not a single superfluous poem (in Invisible Fish). I can only describe the effect of Glassmeyer’s poems to be the admirable result of writing with nerve endings. This is obviously not easy to achieve.

For complete review: http://galatearesurrects2018.blogspot.com/2018/05/invisible-fish-by-susan-f-glassmeyer.html

—Eileen Tabios

Poet, Editor of Galatea Resurrects

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A somatic therapist in the Feldenkrais® tradition, Susan F. Glassmeyer writes poems that address the joys and challenges of embodiment. Many of her best poems explore the mind-body relationship, often invoking memory and imagination to prompt insight. Invisible Fish contains many treasures, each capturing a seemingly mundane event or memory and, through vivid imagery and tonal depth, opening the reader to the sort of healing “ah ha” that I’ll bet her patients at the Holistic Health Center of Cincinnati often experience.

—David Denny

Poet, short story author:  http://www.daviddenny.net/

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