Susan Stevens

Things We Might Miss Susan Stevens

The poems in Things We Might Miss play with two main aspects of missing: experiencing loss (or being deprived), and failing to see--aspects echoed in, respectively, the book's front and back cover photos. But instead of seeing missing as altogether negative, the book praises it in one's affections as desirable--for example, it's arguably a good thing to be able to miss someone, and disagreeable to find a person's constant presence a form of browbeating, or a state where "respect fades/in obliged nearness/into a sort of stupor." Accordingly, these poems reiterate how absence can and should be alluring. The themes of distance and positive tension between people pick up on Kierkegaard's caution on total familiarity, as well as author Philip Wylie's complaint, "That's the trouble with love. People think it involves rights."