Poetry. There is a wise, gentle ire--ancient but not old--running through the brilliant prose poems of Susan Lewis's HEISENBERG'S SALON. This ire is embodied by a woman (maybe the poet, maybe not) who changes with each poem, and yet remains the same. In one poem, she wonders whether a unicorn of impossible radiance will show up at her picnic. She knows it won't, but her annoyance lands, not on the unicorn, but on the wine: it falls a little short. In another, she admits that her life is all illusion, but 'rather / than bemoan the shortcomings... she resolved to / cultivate its restorative potential: lingering and loitering, biding her / time, resting up for the thrill of the night.' Both poet and woman question the expectation of reality in every poem, but remain bent on subverting it any way they can. Perhaps by tweaking the laws of physics. The beauty of HEISENBERG'S SALON is that anything is probable.--Sharon Mesmer

Tiny stories, or large poems, Susan Lewis's writing features exacting, figurative frames, windows in which glimpses of oneself are prismy, apposed by some other real--allegory--sounded in language's slanted order (ardor? --(yes)).--Dale Smith

The compressed cognitive fields of HEISENBERG'S SALON enact paradoxes of nearness: the fundamental limits to the precision with which pairs--lovers, familiars, bodies, properties--can be known. Lewis's poems explore the uncertainty principles that govern attempts to know the position and momentum of human couplings, inextricably caught in the flux of thought and circumstance. Language itself subsumes that flux--Lewis is keenly aware that her medium predetermines and enmeshes her speakers' thoughts before they have the chance to clear their throats. Her measured sentences present gravitational fields of idiomatic speech--a process that torques and exposes the oddities of the vernaculars that surround us. Wry, bemused, cool to the touch, these poems know that language forms can never approximate 'her equivocal heart, ' yet they manage to find meaning and pathos even in its evacuation: 'Many were the days she had nothing to say, or less.'--BK Fischer

Susan Lewis's HEISENBERG'S SALON is a treat to read. These poems carry a tension between surprise and predictability, an exquisite balance which opens new inroads into both form and meaning. In prose poems which waste not a word, Lewis is extremely adept at creating expectations that she gently, consistently, benevolently machinates against. Form perfectly fits content as these subtle poems explore subjectivity versus empirical reality, spirituality versus material commitment, time and mortality versus eternal life, the animate versus the inanimate (boulders, trees), and finally individual creativity and dreamfulness versus the constitution of god or utopia as our collective projections. Reading HEISENBERG'S SALON makes us aware of a poet whose moral calm we need in an era when the divisions amongst us are being elaborated, rather than collapsed, for anti-humanistic ends. It takes a lot of courage to put together a collection like this.--Anis Shivani