In her debut poet­ry col­lec­tion, Out of Nowhere, writer and teacher Susan Comni­nos med­i­tates on the won­der­ment of the nat­ur­al world and the ten­sion between nature’s con­sis­ten­cy and its changes. She notices sim­i­lar­i­ties in art, such as the nud­ists who vis­it the Lou­vre and become their own instal­la­tions. Some of her poems appear to have come out of the pan­dem­ic; the speak­er in the poem ​“Ques­tion for the Sages” finds beau­ty in times when peo­ple feel that there is no rea­son to cel­e­brate, as in ​“the blue­bells that keep ris­ing / from the moist dirt by the dump­ster,” pro­vid­ing bits of hope.

Most poems have brief epigraphs that indi­cate address, like ​“A Love Poem” for the speaker’s moth­er, which begins, ​“Adon­ai of night and of flow­ers, / God of my life. I was not expect­ed to be / beau­ti­ful. When flow­ers grew from my hands, I sur­prised every­one / but my moth­er.” Some of her poems include Jew­ish sym­bols or Hebrew or Yid­dish words. Oth­ers, such as ​“Our Father, Our King” and ​“We Have Tres­passed,” invoke Jew­ish High Holy Day prayers and voice frus­tra­tion with male-cen­tric liturgy.

Many poems depict trav­el­ing or wan­der­ing. In the ​“Arc­tic Trav­el­er,” about a fox who walks thou­sands of miles across ice, the speak­er asks a series of questions:

… What

 

taste kept you slipping

across con­ti­nents, meted

in miles, from your glossed

 

caps in sun­light, all

sum­mer — to this

Cana­di­an post?

There is love in wan­der­lust, the poet seems to say, and ani­mals and their habi­tats ought to be revered. She med­i­tates fur­ther on the rela­tion­ship between humans and the nat­ur­al world when she notes that many peo­ple — like the men dri­ving a truck around a dog park aim­less­ly in the poem ​“At the Dog Park, Late” — intend to dis­rupt its balance.

Full of lyri­cism, Comninos’s poems inter­sperse nat­ur­al beau­ty with love, loss, and faith while pay­ing homage to mean­ing­ful places and peo­ple in her life.