Pouring Small Fire is a debut poetry collection that intricately regenerates a full life experience spanning from the baseball diamonds, pond-mist and summer grass of Upstate New York to hot and sour soup and middle-aged love on Toronto's Spadina Street. Understandably, throughout this journey much is tragically and regretfully left behind, but Manchester's poems form a powerful, life-affirming argument convincing us that it's what is retained -- not only from the past but at this very moment -- that is enduringly important. Manchester possesses the uncanny ability to transport her readers to any specific time and place with her rich and precise memory and her refined command of the language. Hear the banter of the crowd, smell the hot-dog mustard, feel the mud in your fingernails, and "feel feather stroke feather, watch beak peck beak/ to know the instant when image is not image but real." A genuine poet of the senses, Manchester explores the heartache of personal loss as well as the small joys found throughout life--from childhood to marriage.

Susan Manchester has lived most of her life in central New York State, moving to Toronto in 1993. She has taught high school English for twenty-five years, and has also been an instructor at the State University of New York at Morrisville and Utica College of Syracuse University. Her poems have appeared in many periodicals including: The Georgia Review, The League of Canadian Poets Anthology, Tesseracts 8, The Antigonish Review and many others. U.S. poetry awards to her credit include the Milton Dorfman Poetry Prize, the Daniel Varoujan Award and first place in Poetpourri's national summer poetry contest. She divides her time between teaching English at Etobicoke Collegiate Institute in Toronto, acrylic painting, writing and singing.

Susan Manchester's profile page

"Emotions collide from all angles in Manchester's ocean of imagery. Anger, grief, lonliness, passion, and pain swirl together to produce 50 poems that paint pictures while exposing Manchester's deepest emotions . . . The personal and nature tableaus captured on the page buzz with their own intensity." -Quill and Quire

Quill and Quire

"Susan Manchester handles words as if they were precious stones, fondling them gently with a loving hand, and the words, responding to her touch, radiate warmth and life. Her language has a soft, misty quality, and her images fade into each other like the notes of a melody. . . . Her poems have a quiet strength, a stillness that recalls Wordsworth's description of poetry as "emotion recollected in tranquillity." There is a great depth of feeling behind these poems, and the poet has the control, the artistry needed to convey that emotion. Susan Manchester poems are successful in the sense that they never fail to achieve their objectives. What she does, she does supremely well, and her first book of poems leaves us eagerly anticipating the second." -Guy Gauthier, Prairie Fire

Prairie Fire

"Her art transcends the personal to reveal the universal. In fact Manchester's finely crafted lines, burnished images, and unifying motifs reveal not only grief's lengthening shadows but also its luminosity. Small windows in these dark rooms open onto October's colours, abundance, and ripeness."
-Lynda Grace Philippsen, Books in Canada

Books in Canada

"By water, by air, across land - Susan Manchester takes us on a poetic journey through grief, an intense passage that transforms the past and the present into foreign countries. Each element, and above all the element of water, is infused with the task of grieving and its uncertain healing. For Manchester, a harbour is "filled with the air/ we breathe for/ each other," and her one longing is "to touch every shore at the same time." Her gaze is unflinching her command of poetic forms confident and her journey compelling." ­-Maureen Hynes

Maureen Hynes

"Susan Manchester, a sensualist of the ordinary, makes a bold debut with Pouring Small Fire. Her lyrical poems, both tart and dreamy, speak with such pungency and comfort that it's no wonder spicy soup is her drug of choice. So taste her grief and apprehend her wizardry for yourself. Manchester's marvels will never leave you hungry." -Molly Peacock

Molly Peacock