Passion Seeds

"Passion Seeds" by Suzanne Ondrus', winner of the third "Venice Quebodeaux "Pathways" Poetry Prize" by Little Red Tree Publishing, is a wonderful debut collection of poems. Her poetry explores cultural identity and the human dramas that shape and transcend it. Richard Harteis writes in his introduction, "These poems speak to both what we want to keep invisible, such as shame and racism and speak to what we want visible, desire and love. It is the work of a shaman who connects seemingly antithetical threads of reality into the cloth of life. The dream world is where ingenuity lies, for both poets and others. Ondrus taps into both the dream world and reality so that the invisible becomes visible and audible." Larissa Szporluk writes, "Romantic, restless, inquisitive, and hungry, with a timeless sensuality and soul-bearing tone...it is a document of the human moving in and out of love. ...Her poetic fluctuates between a language of self-possession and of dispersion, until 'obliteration of self,' takes place, and the dream to be a poet, not of earth, flesh, race or nation, but of the universal air that regards it all, is achieved." Patricia Jabbeh Wesley writes that the book is, "A provocative debut collection that is brave and urgently necessary. It brilliantly brings us into a new world where poetry is neither American nor African, where over and over, the speaker in each poem discovers another world, another America and another Africa, a larger world outside our vision of the world we thought we knew. This is a book that will surprise."