Philip Terman, author of “This Crazy Devotion”

This Uncertain Voyage is an extraordinary chronicle of a fully-engaged life, resonant in music, visual textures and a vividness of imagination. Impressive in this collection is how, in the many uncertain voyages of these multi-dimensional poems--ranging from subjects that include childhood, marriage, family, nature, art, travel and political/cultural meditations—Nusbaum transforms detailed experience into deep wisdom. The uncertain voyages out are also the uncertain voyages in—into her extraordinarily alive devotions, taking in the worlds she inhabits and “bending” them “to stay alive”.


Shara McCallum, author of “Madwoman”

It’s difficult to condense a life into poems, but Nusbaum’s Alive in this Place achieves just that, offering graceful, moving meditations on love, loss, aging, and acceptance of change. “Alive” to our world, Nusbaum transforms the ordinary—so birch leaves “shiver like confetti against the summer sky.” Every poem beautifully evokes “this place” we inhabit, this earthly “Kingdom of Heaven/where God lives.”


Jane Yolen, author of “Owl Moon” & “The Devil’s Arithmetic”

When a writer makes the ordinary extraordinary, we call her a poet. When she notices “the generosity of maples” we write that down because of its engaging specificity. But when she goes beyond the observed and into the oratorio of loss--widowhood, the older woman’s plaint, I nod and bring my own memories forward, knowing I have to read on to the end of her book of poems, where the old families live—the ones we only remember in the blurred edges of photographs. And then a single comment hits me hard. “the need to put everything right. . .” And that’s when I know I have found a book of poems I shall return to again—for observations and solace, comfort, and promise, while savoring as her husband did, “the departing light”


George Bilgere, author of “Blood Pages” & “Central Air”

“Hunger feasts on remembering,” reflects Susan Nusbaum in This Uncertain Voyage, as she looks back across the wide plains of her own history and the history of her family. The subject matter of these poems is vast: motherhood, marriage, diaspora, the imperiled America we find ourselves living in: but her real setting is the mysterious and beautiful terrain of the human heart. Nusbaum has an ear for the cadences of ordinary speech that suggest the extraordinary. The haunting elegy that is This Uncertain Voyage reminds me of why I came to poetry in the first place.