Suzanne Gardinier
Encyclopedia
Life
Suzanne Gardinier grew up in Scituate, MassachusettsScituate, Massachusetts
Scituate is a seacoast town in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, United States, on the South Shore, midway between Boston and Plymouth. The population was 18,133 at the 2010 census....
. She completed her B.A. at the University of Massachusetts Amherst
University of Massachusetts Amherst
The University of Massachusetts Amherst is a public research and land-grant university in Amherst, Massachusetts, United States and the flagship of the University of Massachusetts system...
in 1981, and her MFA at Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
, in 1986. She is the author of a long poem called The New World. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College
Sarah Lawrence College
Sarah Lawrence College is a private liberal arts college in the United States, and a leader in progressive education since its founding in 1926. Located just 30 minutes north of Midtown Manhattan in southern Westchester County, New York, in the city of Yonkers, this coeducational college offers...
, is a member of PEN
International PEN
PEN International , the worldwide association of writers, was founded in London in 1921 to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers everywhere....
, and lives in Manhattan.
Her work appears in The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and AGNI.
Awards
The New World won the Associated Writing Program's Award Series in poetry in 1992. Suzanne has also received awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Lannan Foundation, and the Kenyon Review Award for Excellence in the Essay.Poetry
- Usahan: Ten Poems and a Story, (Grand Street Books, 1990)
- The New World, (Pittsburgh 1993)
- Today:101 Ghazals, (Sheep Meadow Press, 2008)
- Dialogue with the Archipelago, (Sheep Meadow Press, 2009)
Reviews
SOMETIMES it seems sweetness exists in a voice. A child who sang, for whom life had no business being sweet. "I had the fortune to sing well, and to sing in the church choir from the age of 5 until I was 16," said the young poet Suzanne Gardinier, whose new book of poems was awarded the yearly Pitt Poetry Prize by the University of Pittsburgh Press, who in it has taken on the choral voices of both city and land, as she circles the 50-mile radius from the foot of the statue of Columbus in Columbus Circle, and then out through New Jersey, New York and Long Island, calling back the ghosts of harvests past and trades untenable, and the souls of new immigrants just coming.
It is a book that does not look flinchingly at violence, whether between schoolchildren for whom nobody "turned a face to them judged/ their dispute wiped their cheeks sent them back to their lessons," or the men who cruelly, sensuously fight one another outside bars, the soldiers who forget even the old Greek sensuality of why they are fighting.