Life in Suspension: La Vie Suspendue

What People are Saying About This
Winner of the International Book Award in Poetry, the Pinnacle Book Award for Best Bilingual Poetry Book and the Readers' Favorite Book Award in Poetry. Finalist for 2016 Lascaux Prize in Poetry and the Julie Suk Award (best poetry collection from an independent literary press).

"Cardona distills minutes and crystallizes images...This is poetry with layers of complexity made of lace -- a magic carpet ride, not like anything else around."
--Grace Cavalieri, The Washington Independent Review of Books

"Dappled with transparent imagery, like the Mediterranean sunlight shegrew up with, Hélène Cardona's poems offer a vivid self-portrait as scholar, seer and muse."
--John Ashbery, winner of the PulitzerPrize, National Book Award, and Griffin International Poetry Prize

"Hélène Cardona keenly understands poetry's insistence that we slow down, downshifting into a more measured and conscious pace. Her powerful poems are written line by certain line, which is how her readers gratefully experience them."
--Billy Collins, former U.S. Poet Laureate

"Hélène Cardona tells us that the poems of Life in Suspension were first conceived in English, then rendered into French. Yet for such a many-languaged mind as hers, the translations must have been there from the beginning. It seems, in any case, that each poem fully exists in two tongues at once, and this adds to the book's great charm and visionary quality."
--Richard Wilbur, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes

"Hélène Cardona's poems explore the roiling mysteries on the indistinct borderlines of spiritual landscapes, natural elements, and singular private visions. Surprising, upsetting and, ultimately, uplifting."
--Lawrence Kasdan, Oscar nominated director and screenwriter, Star Wars, The Big Chill, Grand Canyon

"In this bilingual edition of her poems Hélène Cardona is our contemporary ecstatic, time-traveler, and shape-shifter. Behind the dreamlike atmosphere of her poems lies a fierce will to discover beauty, to resurrect ancient enchantments, and to defend enigmas of the spirit. "I like transforming into an animal, / devouring who I was," she writes. Her luminous poems celebrate the imagination's power to dignify and exalt our highest yearnings."
--Lee Upton, winner of a Pushcart Prize and the National Poetry Series Award

"The poems are wonderful and in so many ways continue the vision and conversation of my favorite poet, the DH Lawrence of Birds, Beasts & Flowers... "The Winter Horse" and "Afterglow" are very much in my thoughts these days."
--Donald Revell, winner of the National Poetry Series and the Lenore Marshall Award

"These spare, open-hearted poems reveal Hélène Cardona's astonished universe and give us a 'glimpse into a world full of light'."
--Dorianne Laux, author of The Book of Men, winner of The Paterson Prize

Life in Suspension is a terrific and singular achievement. Very few poets I know could accomplish anything like it, let alone with such grace and clarity.
--Stephen Yenser, winner of the Walt Whitman Award

"Life in Suspension is a love song, a hymn to goodness and beauty."
--La Cause Littéraire

Extraordinary, magical, and poignant.
--Guy Sangster-Adams, The Cultural Pick

A tour de force of language and phonetics; a deeply felt and deeply spiritual collection which explores the universal human experience from a very personal point of view. This is intimate poetry, and yet it transcends the mundane through its lyricism and its glory in language. Hélène Cardona's pen moves from the human to the divine and back in a single sentence, and the result is uplifting and magical.
--Joanne Harris, best-selling author of Chocolat.

These poems compile to form the chronicle of a traveler, without fixed language, without fixed nationality or profession, moving physically from Bar Harbor to Chalkidiki (it's Greece), and emotionally from the calm of floating alone on a lake to the inner hurricane of watching a loved one slip from this world to the next. En route, there are these poetic hesitations, the vibrancy of life trapped in amber."
--J.C. Hallman, The Brooklyn Rail

Cardona creates semantic nuances that light up in multiple directions, while her writing pays close heed to the base level of syntax, rhythm, line and sentence. A tender, pensile world that merits repeated line by line explorations.
--Anthony DiMatteo, The Los Angeles Review

Each poem in this perfectly sequenced elegy/memoir sweeps us into the journey to the transmuted all-ness of the final lines.
--Richard Jarette, Santa Barbara's Voice Magazine

Life in Suspension is a testament to Cardona's unique ability to make words sing on the page. A literary architect, Cardona pushes the exploration of many of her poems to the brink of possibility. Life in Suspension is poetic elegance personified, stylistic flawlessness and depth of thought that belongs on the bookshelf of any poetry lover.
--The US Review of Books

"This is a collections of poetry to be savored slowly and enjoyed againand again."
--Readers' Favorite