Wet Cement Press is excited to present Susan M. Schultz's masterful Meditations: December 2019 - December 2020. A set of lyrical prose meditations on daily life and thought upended and made strange by the events of 2020. 
 
“‘I like the dailiness of this work,’ Susan M. Schultz writes in Meditations. ‘The struggle to get inside the moment that hangs like water droplets on a brown railing after hard rain, to hear the petal’s hinge as it opens, or the cat that scratches to get in, this is a poetics.’ Schultz’s prose poems infuse the lyric voice with the relentless energy of a mind moving in space . . . in single-pointed concentration on the world in all its interdependent phenomena. These are poems of memory and presence, of vision and wakefulness. Meditations is a riveting invitation to see, to reimagine with a communal eye the otherwise cold individualism of our turbulent historical moment.” —Tony Trigilio, author of Proof Something Happened
 
“I’m blown away by Susan M. Schultz’s Meditations, a profound work of wisdom and resistance literature in times of escalating precarity for many. Over a long year in the life of the American Republic, complete with its wannabe Emperor, Meditations takes us into an everyday poetics of survival amid imbrications of climate, political, social, and pandemic crises. How are we to live in such times: ‘an orchid pushing open on the lanai; a cop throwing a woman to the ground’. Schultz invites readers to deep dive into the poet’s practice of stilling the spinning world by simple everyday acts. Meditations allows us to accompany the poet in her radical attentiveness to our contemporary moment’s fracture, which yields also its capacity for irony, openness, neighbourliness and care. A remarkable work and a wild pleasure to read.” —Beth Yahp, author of Eat First, Talk Later
 
“Meditations uphold, undermine, stay on the ground, distrust the overly serious, use a phrase to deflate pomposity, grieve. Neocons beware! Susan M. Schultz has developed a way of life-writing entirely her own.” —Deborah Meadows, author of Lecture Notes: a duration poem in twelve parts 
 
Susan M. Schultz is author of many books of poetry and poetic prose, including Dementia Blog, "She's Welcome to Her Disease": Dementia Blog, Vol. 2, and several volumes of Memory Cards. Her most recent book was Lilith Walks, from BlazeVox. Her critical book, A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary Poetry was published by the University of Alabama Press. She edited Tinfish Press for over 20 years. She lives in Hawai`i with her husband, Bryant, three cats and Lilith the dog; she is a lifelong fan of the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team.