Umbrella
A Journal of Poetry and Kindred Prose


Susan Rich

is the author of Cures Include Travel and the winner of the PEN USA Poetry Award and the Peace Corps Writers Award for The Cartographer’s Tongue / Poems of the World.

Her work appears this year in The Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Poetry International, and Women’s Review of Books.

Her book, The Alchemist’s Kitchen is due out from White Pine Press.


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In Answer to My Family:
At Forty-Seven, What Are You Looking For?

I long to live as
a lighthouse keeper ensconced

on the lip of this world

my needs complete
as lamp fuel, raincoat, flour.

I’ll wake at ease with the infinite

blue, silver, and mottled gold;
in ocean storms rising;

awash in cool luminescence

claiming the light-
house life as my own.