Susan Stenson teaches English and creative writing to high school students. She also co-edits The Claremont Review, a literary venue that showcases young, emerging writers. In 1999, Susan's poem "When You Say Infidelity" won First Prize in Canada's biggest poetry competition, the League of Canadian Poets' National Poetry Contest. Her manuscript A Little Less Swing A Little More Sway won the Hawthorne Poetry Award in 1997. Susan's work had appeared in several magazines, most recently, Descant, The Malahat Review, The Cormorant, and Harpweaver. Her poems will also be broadcast on Poets Premiere, CBC Radio, in the fall of 1999.

Threshold
An Anthology of Six New Female Poets
edited by Rona Murray
with Barbara Colebrook Peace, Dorothy Field, Alisa Gordaneer, Kelly Parsons, and Suzanne Steele

Could Love a Man

In this first collection of poetry, Susan Stenson appears before the reader as a fully realized talent, as someone who has been writing for decades instead of only a few years. Hers is a landscape that runs from the heat of Mazatlán to the damp streets of Dublin. Along the way, she pulls us into gardens where infidelity grows wild, into hotel rooms and private schools, up the mountain slopes of Machu Picchu. We meet lucky drunks and dying men, pregnant women who drive taxis. We sit in bars alongside “winter’s low paunch of sun,” and we listen, because in this book a powerful voice is speaking. - Terence Young