All the Secrets Around Me
a sort of book review
(still catching up on my “you should read this book, pile” and everything else.)
I first “met” Sue Blaustein through social media and poetry. It was the summer of 2020. The year of Covid, George Floyd, protests and a presidential election. I first started making homemade and DIY chapbooks around then, and Sue submitted some poems to a monthly anthology, and I’ve been a fan of her work ever since.
Sue Blaustein is as blue collar and working class as it gets, and her work even features dive bars and their barflies, but unlike so many of us that only know the story from one side of the bar, Sue takes us with her behind the scenes and gives us a view into the lives of working people from the lens of her life spent working as a food safety inspector.
Her poetry is real. It deals not only with the hard science of food safety, but also with the subjective science of how to interact with those around us.
Her poetry is honest. It’s searching. It questions everything: what she knows, the status quo and what you think you know, and it’s full of the messy business of humanity and its many variations.
Her new chapbook, All the Secrets Around Me, picks up the same veins of her previous books (In the Field: Autobiography of an Inspector and The Beer Line) but also goes deeper, searches farther and is her best work to date.
The book has lighthearted poems that made me laugh and poems so heavy that my heart nearly refused to lift them. And yes, there are behind the scenes hole-in-the-wall tavern tales, and now we’ll all forever know why Johnny’s switched to beer cans.
All the Secrets Around Me is printed by a local Milwaukee printer, something Sue does that I admire. The cost is $12 and you can order a copy here.
I like her stuff, too, which I first ran across on Zoom readings. A good human being and poet.