BOOKS

To purchase any of my books, click on the links or send me a message and I'll be happy to fill your order.

YELLOW CRANE (Brick Books, 2018)

ISBN: 9781771314916

$20.00, 88 pages

- Finalist, Association for Studies in Literature and the Environment (ASLE) Creative Writing Book Award

- Jurors' Selection, Grand prix du livre de Montréal

"In these clear-eyed, searching meditations on time, place, art, desire, and the complex ecology of inner life--among other ecologies--a sensualist’s love of the fleshed and fleeting world wrestles with the cognitive dissonance of conscious life in our times. What Gillis says about a wasps’ nest might as well be said about her book: 'Ingenious device, this paper house. The wind rushes in its cells.' "

—Suzanne Buffam

"Susan Gillis is alive to the world. Her poems embody our troubled search for meaning, and yet they inspire in the reader a joy in things-as-they-are, both in the natural environment and the urban one."

—Mary Jo Salter

THE RAPIDS (Brick Books, 2012)
ISBN 978-1-926829-79-1
$19, 103 pages

- Finalist, A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry

The presiding spirit of the book is force: wind, water, and time at work on the body and on the body of the world. Like the river that is its measure, The Rapids is full of sudden shifts—a polyphony of surges and eddies and remarkable leaps.

“The Rapids, Susan Gillis’s ravishing new collection, gives us the strange loops of ordinary moments: a farewell at a train station, an empty room, the first bloodroot in spring. Her poems—airy, shimmering—reveal a slippage in time and space. We are not where we thought we were—not at all.” – Anne Simpson

“At the heart of The Rapids is a lucidly articulate intelligence continuously on the move, taking unexpected turns, opening up multiple new perspectives on every phenomenon—architecture, romance, the Russian novel, St. Jerome, the rapids themselves—ultimately overturning all assumptions and conclusions. Yet what remains after riding these rapids into the clear is a bell-like, haunting calm.”
– Roo Borson

VOLTA (Signature Editions, 2002)
ISBN 978-0921833864
$14.95, 80 pages

-Winner, A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry

In Volta, Gillis plays with the “turn,” exploring new directions, new angles, and changing forms.

"Intelligent, sophisticated, witty, this is poetry of both technical virtuosity and feeling. Its language is tuned so finely it can move from the mundane to the rhapsodic in a few beats of the line, in the space of a breath.”
—Mary di Michele
Limited Availability/Available direct from author

SWIMMING AMONG THE RUINS (Signature Editions, 2000)
ISBN 978-0921833703
$14.95, 96 pages

- Finalist, Pat Lowther Award
- Finalist, ReLit Award

The submerged foundations of a ruined city, ancient statuary and place names, a drop of water echoing in an empty tomb, heat left on a path walked by generations—Gillis examines these remnants of passage, looking back toward their origins and forward into the possibilities of transformation.

“Rapt, wholly attentive to the tang of the moment, Susan Gillis' poems take us to moods we thought familiar and reveal them as thresholds of risk and awakening: they remind us that vulnerability to lyric beauty is always the necessary danger.”

—Don McKay

Limited availability; contact the press or the author

OBELISK (Gaspereau Press, 2017)
ISBN 978-1554471669
$4.95, 32 pages
Available from the press or the author

THE SKY THESE DAYS (Thee Hellbox Press, 2016)
Letterpress, hand-stitched, in an edition of 75 copies
This book is a series of poems in the Japanese tanka style, each overlaid with a ligature.
Limited availability; contact the author