The Alchemy of Love: Tanka

by Susan Burch

High/Coo Chapbook Award 2024

ISBN 978-1-929820-31-3 • perfectbound
August 1, 2024, 48 pages (4" X 5.75") • $15.00

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This book is dedicated to:

my husband, Bill, who has stuck by my side and loved me for 23 years. I can’t thank him enough for a wonderful life together and for inspiring these poems. Thank you Bill!

Purple dragons unite!

                     ~ Susan Burch

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About the Author

Susan Burch is the current First Vice President of the Tanka Society of America (TSA). She began writing tanka in April 2013 after reading winning contest poems on the TSA website. She loved the brevity of the form and submitted to Ribbons, which published her first tanka and encouraged her to keep writing.

 

 

Since then she has placed in many tanka contests, coordinates the TSA contest, and features tanka writers on social media. Her ongoing goal is to promote the tanka form and to attract new readers and writers to tanka poetry.

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drowning
in a whirlpool
from the moment
I saw you,
it was love

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the rarity
of a yellow cardinal —
finding someone
who loves you
just as you are

~ ~ ~

telling me
how much I matter —
getting lost
in the alchemy
of love

~ ~ ~

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Introduction

Welcome to my world of love poems. This collection features tanka on romantic love, self-love, and love of nature, that I have written over the past 10 years. These poems are a departure from my everyday tanka and show a softer side of me I usually don’t share. And while they’re not as mysterious as the old court poems, I like to think of them as joining the waka tradition, going back to the roots of tanka, and giving them my own modern twist.
~ Susan Burch

 

a flamingo
walking on water
how your love
makes me feel
lighter than air

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Star Trek
has nothing on them
in our tree
the intergalactic language
of catbirds

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for the days
I feel damaged
beyond repair
a love letter
to myself

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a farmer
retilling his fields . . .
if I had to
do it all again,
I'd still choose you

~ ~ ~

 

Acknowledgments

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following journals and publications in which some of these poems appeared:

Take 5ive, March 2023

Linda Jeanette Ward Anthology, 2022

World Tanka Love Contest, July 2023

Frameless Sky, Nov/Dec 2020

HaikuKatha, October 2023

Bamboo Hut, December 2013

Take 5ive. December 2022

Ribbons, Tanka Hangout, 2024

Tanka Origins, March 2020

Gusts, Fall/Winter 2014

Switch, July 2017

Ribbons, Tanka Hangout, 2023

Ribbons, Tanka Café, 2021

Gusts, Fall/Winter 2022

Blithe Spirit, 2018

Scarlet Dragonfly, December 2022

Gusts, Spring/Summer 2020

HaikuKatha, January 2024

Time Haiku, 2023

Ribbons, Tanka Café, 2019

2024 Subscription PDF Bundle

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