Muse Poems by Susan Aizenberg   March 2002 ISBN 0-8093-2443-1, $14.95 paper 88 pages, 6 x 9 Poetry   The Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Jon Tribble, series editor   “How can art and life coexist? This is one of the big questions that Susan Aizenberg raises in the superbly crafted, deeply felt poems of Muse. From a beautiful elegy for the poet Lynda Hull to a brilliant sequence on Vivian Eliot, we are moved by narrative, delighted by the music of speech, and dazzled by glittering imagery. But ultimately Aizenberg forces us to confront disturbing questions about how the aesthetic can be reconciled with the ethical. She faces these questions unflinchingly. They are the heart of her enterprise. A real, three-dimensional human being emerges out of the phrasing, the images, and the thoughts of these memorable poems, shaped out of words but entangled in the gritty detail of ordinary life.” —Maura Stanton, author of Glacier Wine   “Clearly Susan Aizenberg has chosen to serve the most demanding of the nine muses, Clio, the muse of history. Aizenberg honors her with rich and vital poems of personal history, elegy, and what could be called Lyrics of the Long Haul—poems of the middle years, poems which testify to the difficulties of grace and the precious arrival of wisdom. This is an elegant and sustained volume. More importantly, it is an instructive one.” —David Wojahn, author of The Falling Hour   Muse, the first full-length collection from poet Susan Aizenberg, brings together poems of personal history, elegy, and the complex lives of artists, writers, and “ordinary” people, in an exploration of the relationship between art and life, esthetics and ethics. She is sharp-eyed in purpose, trying to understand “what love is” in a continual shifting between loss and knowledge. While "there is no other world than this one" for Aizenberg, nevertheless she finds a world of affirmation. Aizenberg sings elegant blues, keeps a perfect balance between elaboration and restraint with formal skill that is both impressive and consoling, reminding us that poetry is a form of intelligence in which music creates a world full of mystery and depth.   Susan Aizenberg is the coeditor (with Erin Belieu) of The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women, a contributing editor to the Nebraska Review, and author of a chapbook-length collection of poems, Peru, which appears in Take Three: 2: AGNI New Poets Series. Her poems have appeared and are forthcoming in the Journal, AGNI, Chelsea, Prairie Schooner, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and many other publications. She is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska.     Cortland, 1970   Always Monday, light October drizzle misting our hair, wet- wool musk of our peacoats. Remember your father’s library? Three-for-a-buck novels,   all the rosy headlights he could dream, group-gropes he couldn’t. Breakfast was beer in a jelly glass. Then the ten-block walk, hardscrabble shacks   imploding, to swing shift at Smith Corona. I still have the scar acid etched through my jeans that first night. Peeling them down in the ladies’ room, I found a black   circle the size of a quarter. In May we married between small claims and traffic courts, my mother sweating in cheap mink, the best man sniffling, aching to get straight.   Twenty-Five Years from Anywhere Like That Shoulder, hip, and heel, I sprint faster in my wingless Nikes, circling  the Boys Town track as Bonnie Raitt’s roadhouse wail and slide guitar snake wire.   Cottonwoods blur like a hypnotist’s watch until the track disappears and I’m back in the third row of the Fillmore East, where Janis Joplin, too wasted   to sing, slugged honeyed mash from a high-tipped bottle. We sang “Ball and Chain” a cappella on the D train, grinding high notes breaking the national anthem   as the subway rocked the sour dark, red and blue lights strobing. That year, we traded up to barefoot rides in limousines, four-way sunshine   for breakfast:  onion grass looney-tuning into little green men. Now teenage girls from Boys Town pass me quick, a middle-aged woman they can’t imagine seventeen, running away, that burnt-out place on Rickard Street, a bare mattress under the corona of shot gun holes   left there for the landlord by a flute player who cared for no one but sent his clear notes up the fire escape anyway.