#susan conley

[universitybookstore]

New from Knopf and the author of The Foremost Good Fortune, Susan Conley, Elsey Come Home: A Novel.

[virgin-martyr]

Nineteenth-century women poets, unlike their male counterparts, 'could not afford irony, for their first task was to show their right to a place in poetry, not their discordance with it.' Yet for Rossetti, as surely for Barrett Browning, part of the struggle to show her 'right to a place in poetry' involves an interrogation which certainly registers 'discordances' with those dominant discourses. Irony, says Mermin, 'with its doubleness of meaning and emotional detachment, went against everything a woman writer was supposed to be.' While this may be so, it is just these features that characterize many of Rossetti's most famous lyrics.

Susan Conley, excerpt from “Rossetti’s Cold Women: Irony and Liminal Fantasy in the Death Lyrics,” from The Culture of Christina Rossetti: Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts

[bigtickhk]

On a Bucolic Maine Island, Life Can Be Rocky — Especially With Teen Boys

In her latest novel, “Landslide,” Susan Conley plunges into the deep end of parenthood.

Landslide by Susan Conley https://amzn.to/3dcURSC

https://bookshop.org/a/17891/9780525657132

[virgin-martyr]

Some of Rossetti's lyrics in which the speaker is a dead or dying woman seem to take the image of the confined or incarcerated woman so prevalent in Victorian literature and art to a logical extreme. Poems such as 'Echo' and 'The Convent Threshold' depict the grace as the Pre-Raphaelite woman's ultimate nightmare, an entrapment in living hell. In other lyrics death seems the fulfillment of the speaker's wish, offering a potentially liberating liminal space and time. Poems such as 'Song,' 'Remember,' and 'After death' are melancholy songs of lovers sundered by death, replete with decorative imagery, and stylized archaisms; at the same time, however, they perform a sleight of hand, a resistance to the very aesthetics with which they seem complicit. In these poems, death becomes both an indictment of life and the moment of revenge on oppression, an opportunity, paradoxically, for the dead woman to exercise power and control. Writing of two twentieth-century women poets, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, Elisabeth Bronfen argues that they 'cite conventional conceptions of feminine death so as to recode these radically in such a way that death emerges as an act of autonomous self-fashioning.' This is, I believe, how many of Rossetti's death lyrics should be read. The living dead, one who speaks from the grave, is as paradoxical a being as the woman poet; both speak from the traditional position of silence and radical otherness. Furthermore, speaking from the liminal space and time of death on the one hand provides a figure for the women poet's disembodied act of creation; in this figure (the voice of the dead) she escape her female body–which ideologically circumscribes her as the muse and matter of art–and gives full rein to her 'Poet mind.' Yet one the other hand, speaking from the place of the body–the deathbed or grave–as these speakers do, refuses that very escape: the cool, self-contained and thus powerful female voice is kept in close, uncanny proximity to the site that confirms her ideological association with mute, corruptible matter.

Susan Conley, excerpt from “Rossetti’s Cold Women: Irony and Liminal Fantasy in the Death Lyrics,” from The Culture of Christina Rossetti: Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts

“Long regarded as suitably tender and demure ‘love personals’ or, more recently, as wholly complicit with a misogynist aesthetic that eroticizes the figure of female death, these lyrics should be heard as ‘cool, bitter’ commentaries on Victorian sexual and textual politics.

[waldorfsaladcottagefries]

Twenty Nutrient-Rich Super Foods That Keep Us Well

Twenty Nutrient-Rich Super Foods That Keep Us Well

Susan Conley stopped by the blog to share her 20 nutrient-packed foods that can help us fight disease, give us a BOOST of energy and even help us lose weight.  A few of my favorites are spinach(eat full handfuls every morning for breakfast), dark chocolate is my afternoon snack and finally garlic.

    Meet Susan Conley from Cook the Stone Follow on FB here Follow Susan on Twitter here

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[mewomenwriters]

Makeshift fireworks shops have set up all over the city, and one of these metal sheds sits below our living room window. There are men you can hire down there to set your fireworks off for you if you're scared, or think explosives are beneath you. But you've got to buy the things and watch them get lit, even if you just stand by your car near the side of the road, because the only way you'll rid the next year of evil spirits is to witness each explosion

Susan Conley from "The Foremost Good Fortune"

[aaknopf]

Set against the fascinating backdrop of modern China, Susan Conley, author of The Foremost Good Fortune, writes about her two-year stint in a high-rise in Beijing...with two young sons in tow. Despite the difficulties, there is much occasion for joy in Susan and her family's lives, from trips to the Great Wall to feasting on the world's best dumplings in back-alley restaurants. But after she finds out that she has cancer, Susan moves back to the US. After treatment in Boston, she returns to Beijing once again, but this time, for herself. This wry and poignant memoir is a candid look at mortality and belonging as well as a celebration of family.

To get more information about the author and book, please visit Susan Conley's website.