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Poems 4 A.M.
Poems 4 A.M.

 

Rapture
Rapture

 

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Evening

 

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Lust and Other Stories
Lust and Other Stories

 


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Susan Minot grew up in Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts. Her first novel, Monkeys, was published in a dozen countries and received the Prix Femina Étranger in France. She is the author of Evening, Folly, Lust & Other Stories and most recently the novella Rapture. She wrote the screenplay for Bernardo Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty. She currently lives on North Haven Island in Maine.

Photo (c) Dinah Minot Hubley


In these poems, we come to know a different side of the acclaimed novelist Susan Minot. We find her awake in the middle of the night, contemplating love and heartbreak in all their exhilarating and anguished specifics. With astonishing openness, in language both passionate and enchanting, she offers us an intimate map of a troubled and far-flung heart: “Can you believe I thought that?” she asks, “That we would always go/roaming brave and dangerous/on wild unlit roads?”

At once witty and tender, with Dorothy Parker–like turns of the knife and memorable partings from lovers in New York, London, Rome and beyond, these poems capture a restless movement through loves and locales, and charm us at every turn with their forthrightness.


Four years after her critically acclaimed novel Evening, Susan Minot gives us a new work of startling intimacy and precision.

Using a single interlude–a brief encounter of old lovers; two bodies entwined on a bed at midday–Minot defines the distance that erupts at what seems to be the height of connection, as well as the extent to which the senses deceive, and the intensely private eroticism of fantasy and the imagination. Minot's lovers are mesmerizing in their individual journeys–one moving toward a kind of holy consummation, the other toward abnegation and blank despair. This is the wayward history of their efforts to make contact with each other while deluding themselves about the nature of the contact they're making. Graphic, erotic, provocative, Rapture is a meditation on romantic love, sex, and their reflections in the life of the mind.