•  Milwaukee Poet Laureate 2008-2010   •

The best part about Milwaukee Does Strange Things To People is that, because it features almost three decades of work, it allows readers to witness Firer's metamorphosis from a young, intellectual spitfire to a wise and reverent woman who's still willing to dip a toe--or three--into the ever-changing lake.
   • Molly Snyder Edler
     OnMilwaukee.com

Firer returns to themes that have remained throughout her career, often with wry humor and candor, but also a kind of sharp nostalgia, with veneration for that small gesture or place that is often overlooked. “Small Milwaukee Museums” lists a series of unlikely collisions of incident and place. The simple act of bathing her father in flower petals as a child combines the ephemeral and delicate nature of childhood with the gravity and yearning of adulthood in “Recovery.” A poem recounting a formative encounter with the power of poetry, “of bouquets of confusion, feasts of loss,” conjures the sweet pang of youthful discovery in “Mrs. Post’s 6th-hour English Class.” Like all exceptional poetry, it allows us to reach back into our own experiences and see in them an unqualified, fleeting splendor.
   • Aisha Motlani
     ExpressMilwaukee.com

About the Author:
Susan Firer's poetry has been published in literary magazines such as Chicago Review and Iowa Review, and in anthologies such as Best American Poetry of 1992. In addition to The Backwaters Prize for 2001, she has won the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Prize, and was named Milwaukee's Poet Laureate in 2008. Firer received her Master's degree from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, where she is Assistant Professor of English.

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