On the Doorstep

by Susan Shaw Sailer

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This collection of lyric and narrative poems unapologetically takes on aging and mortality with frankness, humor, and gratitude for a fully lived past and present life. The poems in On the Doorstep attest to the passion for living that accompanies loss and revel in oneness with nature, mysteries of self, and connections to others—“each person’s / brightness kisses me with difference / that grows and grounds me, / each one beauteous.”

POETRY / General 

ISBN: 978-1-962082-70-9 (print; softcover; perfect bound)

LCCN: 2025937120

Released May 20, 2025  |  Copyright 2025

82 pages

Author Biography

Susan Shaw Sailer has previously published three books of poems— 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

“What I like best about this book is its wonderfully unapologetic take on aging: its moxie and humor, ‘Giant colon hoards / poop like Fort Knox gold’; its spiritual intelligence and calm acceptance, ‘Leaf detaching / from the tree, I’ll nourish what comes next’; and the abiding gratitude for all the pleasures still intact, as upon getting hearing aids, ‘For returning me to the world’s terror, / its beauty, its love, I thank you.’ I’m grateful for these lovely poems, for the lesson in aging gracefully.”
—April Ossmann, author of Anxious Music and Event Boundaries

“On the Doorstep sends primal questions out into the world: Do I want that power? . . . When you break, will you find a warm sea to empty into? Shaw Sailer teaches us in the voice of a spirited woman: I come from rivers, though I live on land. These life-earned poems move us to wonder what is concealed, what is open—as we readers are re-made over and over to . . . fly on new-grown wings. A stunning book!”
—Jan Beatty, author of Dragstripping

“In tender, dexterous poems, Susan Sailer transforms quotidian moments into the unexpected and even the profound. Drawing on both wonder and gratitude, and exploring questions of mortality and aging, she seems to ask, What is a life? These poems are rich with being, with the wholeness that one long life can become. On the Doorstep is a book to savor and hold close.” ­
—Anne Marie Macari, author of Heaven Beneath

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