Leavenworth writer Angela Sucich publishes award-winning chapbook

Leavenworth resident Angela Sucich will have her first book of poems, Illuminated Creatures by Finishing Line Press, published in the fall of 2023. The chapbook won the 2022 New Women’s Voices Chapbook Competition and was shortlisted for the 2022 Saguaro Poetry Prize and the 2022 CutBank Chapbook Contest.

Sucich, who holds a PhD in medieval literature from the University of Washington, puts her expertise to creative use in Illuminated Creatures, exploring human experiences through the frame of animal lore and interrogating the dubious stories and illustrations that brought the creatures to life in old manuscripts. Poems play with the structures and constraints of poetic forms, as well as more thematic boundaries and the questions they raise.

Tess Taylor, NPR poetry reviewer and author of Rift Zone, Last West, and Work & Days, writes: “Angela Sucich’s halcyon book is humming, full of self-made, remade myths, full of animals and beasts which often gleam, worlds in which ‘a silver lining/ flashes like a minnow pinned.’”

Poet Bill Carty, author of Huge Cloudy and We Sailed on the Lake, writes:

“The poems chart a course from past to present, from infancy to death, lighting a path through dark woods into a new lore, a world in which ‘the birds / will call us kind.’”

“Wonderfully vivid in its imagery and delight with language, and also learned in the best sense, Angela Sucich’s Illuminated Creatures enlightens us in its contemporary enactment of a medieval bestiary,” writes poet Carolyne Wright, author of Masquerade and This Dream the World: New & Selected Poems. “Its animal and avian characters, who possess wonderful names derived from fable—basilisk, caladrius, halcyon, hydrus—frolic, fly and slither across these metaphorically illuminated pages […] This is a powerful and resonant debut.”

Illuminated Creatures is currently available for preorder from the publisher at a discounted price through August 4, 2023. The book ships on September 29, 2023.

Angela Sucich is a writer and poet living in Leavenworth, Washington. She holds a Ph.D. in Medieval Literature from the University of Washington (2007) and has taught writing and literature courses at multiple academic institutions. Her poems and short prose have appeared in such journals as Nimrod International Journal, Cave Wall, Atlanta Review, and Whale Road Review. Nominated for two Pushcart Prizes, a Best New Poets, and an Orison Books Best Spiritual Literature Award, she was honorably mentioned for the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry in 2021. Finishing Line Press is an award-winning small press publisher based in Georgetown, Kentucky.