The poems in Where Good Swimmers Drown are love poems. But love poems that defy the divisions between emotion and intellect, private and public, life and art, writer and reader. To read Elbe's poems is to discover not only what it means to be in love, but what it means to be alive. Jesse Lee Kercheval, author of Cinema Muto and The Dog Angel

Poetry. "I want a book of poems to act like a genuine book and not just a miscellany of the poet's most recent work willy-nillied between covers. Susan Elbe's THE MAP OF WHAT HAPPENED is just such a thoughtful, integrated collection, lovingly (and, I'm betting, painstakingly) assembled, occupying a space/time continuum all its own from beginning to end. This book is so much more than a sum of its estimable parts; there is such palpable life here because there are so many human lives in its pages. And this poet has a real stake in showing us the various ways in which they honestly matter. By...