About this event
On Tuesday, May 4th, TAVP held a poetry reading with poet and TAVP’s Access to Treatment Project Coordinator Susannah Sheffer. She shared some of her work in celebration of the publication of her poetry collection Break and Enter. Many of the poems in the book draw from Susannah’s experience listening to and witnessing the hard stories of people she has worked with in one way or another over the years. You can order your copy of Break and Enter here.
About Susannah Sheffer:
Susannah Sheffer’s poems have appeared in a variety of journals including Poet Lore, The Threepenny Review, Copper Nickel, and Tar River Poetry, and her chapbook This Kind of Knowing was published by Cooper Dillon Books. She is a clinical mental health counselor who frequently works with people who have experienced trauma, and also a writer and researcher focusing on the impact of the death penalty. Her 2013 book Fighting for Their Lives: Inside the Experience of Capital Defense Attorneys is based on in-depth interviews with 20 attorneys who had lost at least one client to execution, and the report she wrote with Texas After Violence Project, Nobody To Talk To: Barriers to Treatment for Family Members of Individuals Who Have Been Sentenced to Death or Executed, came out in 2019.
Praise for Break and Enter:
Susannah Sheffer writes poems for the same reason people place pebbles on headstones — to mark both the loss and its marking, to acknowledge that grief has physical weight and to release a little bit of it, to “leave evidence” and “show what we mean.” And her poems are like those stones: small, solid, timeless, wholly themselves and whole unto themselves. If life is going to break us, Sheffer is going to spend her producing durable things. — Eric McHenry, author of Odd Evening
“We all know how complicated/the heart is, how it…/expects to be swindled” — yet, Susannah Sheffer reminds us, we “cannot say no to it.” I’m in awe of the craft of these poems, how throughout this work dualities are not only masterfully revealed but also honored. The speaker in the poems acknowledges the duality of everything and does so with a smooth ease of acceptance. Here, the broken glistens like pieces of glass held up to light. The book’s seductive poems are the maps of feelings that give you “somewhere else to go.” I will return to these poems again and again. –Joy Gaines-Friedler, author of Capture Theory
