Learning to Count

by Susan Shaw Sailer

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The poems in Susan Shaw Sailer’s Learning to Count, set in both the natural and social worlds, explore aging, violence, and reclaiming power while making the argument that individual growth and social justice work hand in hand.

POETRY / General 

ISBN: 978-1-971191-19-5 (print; softcover; perfect bound)

LCCN: 2026943498

Released June 16, 2026  |  Copyright 2026

90 pages

Author Biography

Susan Shaw Sailer has published four books of poems—On the Doorstep, The Distance Beyond Sight, The God of Roundabouts, Ship of Light—and two chapbooks, Bulletins from a War Zone and COAL. Sailer lives in Morgantown, West Virginia, and is a member of the Madwomen in the Attic program of Carlow University and also of Pauletta Hansel’s From Draft to Craft class. She was a professor of English at West Virginia University and before that taught English in Tacoma Public Schools.

Endorsements

“Susan Shaw Sailer's Learning to Count reckons with family trauma, failed loves, a country that is failing its children, and the awful power of silence—angry silence, peace-keeping silence, self-protective silence. These finely crafted, emotionally unflinching poems honor the arithmetic of a woman’s inner life and take us on a journey to understanding that ‘love’s generous / words could / silence silence.’ What counts amidst all these struggles? Love’s ‘3 perfect decades, 4 bouts / of laughter before breakfast, 1,321 ways / to sing, a trillion ways to nurture ourselves / as gifts.’”
—Nancy Krygowski, co-editor of Pittsburgh Poetry Series; author of The Woman in the Corner

“Susan Shaw Sailer’s Learning to Count is a journey through the speaker’s life that, as the best poetry does, allows the reader to understand her own journey more fully. ‘At the table of my past, ghosts stare,’ Sailer writes. She encounters these ghosts with courage and compassion, with especial attention to the ways in which we move from silence into voice. ‘I will not be silenced / I will not silence,’ the poet tells us. We are enriched by her words.”
—Pauletta Hansel, author of Understory: A Women’s History of Appalachia

“The poems in Susan Shaw Sailer's Learning to Count tell the story of a life from childhood to old age. Sailer's memories have the
vividness and accuracy of a child raised in a violent home. The father is physically and emotionally violent toward the poet, her
younger brothers, and the mother. All of them have learned silence in the face of his rage. In addition to the personal accounts in these
poems, Sailer also relates the range of world events that affect any life, including the drive-by and school shootings of recent years, the wars, the diseases, and the constant presence of guns in our lives. The title, Learning to Count, allows the speaker of these poems to ask questions of herself, her relationships, her family of origin, and the fierce wounds the world creates.  Learning to Count also conveys a study the speaker has made of language. To count means to put in order. It is also a way to be present and seen, as in "stand and be counted. But the central meaning here is the evocation of all things that matter. Learning to Count is a book of poems written by a grown woman, and the story Sailer tells is intelligent, frightening, musical, and often humorous. She has written beautifully of a world in which everything counts, everything matters.”
—Maggie Anderson, author of Dear All

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