Susan Elbe was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois and currently makes her home in Madison, Wisconsin. She is the author of Light Made from Nothing (Parallel Press). She has been awarded the 2006 Lorine Niedecker Award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers, the CALYX inaugural Lois Cranst on Memorial Poetry Prize, a Rowland Foundation residency to the Vermont Studio Center, and two residencies to Edenfred in Madison, Wisconsin, funded by the Terry Family Foundation. She serves on the Council for Wisconsin Writers Board of Directors and the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission (2006-2010 appointment).

Other poems by Susan Elbe in Verse Daily:
February 5, 2006:   "Perseveration" " All the road rage, rolling blackouts..."

Books by Susan Elbe: Eden in the Rearview Mirror

Other poems on the web by Susan Elbe:
Two poems
"Rhythms of Morning"

Susan Elbe's Home Page.

About Eden in the Rearview Mirror:

"This exquisite book born from early loss—a young mother—brings Susan Elbe's readers the small solace of the world where birds fly, 'each bird a slash of ink, a declaration rising,' and observations are cut out by the poet left behind: 'What do we look like dreaming?/ Smooth black silk at the lip of waterfall.' Not desire, not love, nothing in 'this bright world,' can heal this wound. Only the poems do, for the writer and for us. I can't remember a manuscript that enacts so well a painful or difficult transformation. Read and love this book as I do."
—Hilda Raz

"Susan Elbe's luminous lines delicately tip back and forth between outer and inner worlds. As 'the sheer silk of the river wrinkling / salmon-pink in last-ditch sunlight,' her poems sift the phenomenal world for the refraction of memories in time. These are memorable, moving poems."
—Arthur Sze

"Eden in the Rearview Mirror, Susan Elbe's new volume of beautifully crafted poetry, reflects an enviable sense of self-awareness, as well as the weight of conviction. These poems touch with searing honesty on matters of love, loss, and disaffection, and yet even the darkest of them somehow seem lit from within—not with flash and glitter, but with a slant, silvery sheen that both illuminates and demystifies. From a moving meditation on the death of the poet's mother to her astute advice on the art of 'Practicing Eternity,' Elbe speaks to the reader in a rich vocabulary that, in her words, 'shows the world shining through windows runneled with rain."
—Marilyn Taylor