Interviews
Reviews
About Eyes of Some Robbers:
“In Eyes of Some Robbers, Suzette Bishop exposes the intimate, repressive, and collective nature of Harm by personifying it, placing it in as many contexts as it exists in her life, and making it a blood and bones character with which the speaker interacts, thereby destroying the power of unspoken trauma. These poems are a catalogue of Harm, a grief ritual that brings healing through a ‘gloomy atmospherics, / artfully placed cobwebs, / crescendoing music.’
The book begins with a light that is elusive and daunting in its promise to clarify things, to bring truths out of the dark and into view. The first poem gets its title, ‘it lighted up the way like a torch,’ from a phrase found in Hans Christian Andersen’s Snow Queen’s Fifth Story: The Little Robber Girl. Bishop builds on the complex relationship of the Little Robber Girl and Gerda, creating a shadow world to the one in the fairy tale, shaking the foundations of the household into which she is born . . . the reader begins to see the power of survival, the hard-won brilliance of a victim turned creator of her own destiny.” Jane Ann Fuller, Trampoline: A Journal of Poetry, Spring 2026 https://www.trampolinepoetry.com/reviews
About Unbecoming:
“Unbecoming is a brilliant guide to being. Suzette Bishop’s new chapbook bears her signature polyphonic weave of personal story and source texts. I have followed Bishop, a poetic innovator for decades; once again I am in awe. Generating energy as she juxtaposes scientific findings with childhood fairytales, Bishop illuminates her cyclic struggles with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS).
The poet etches her excruciating pain on this book’s pages, playing with visual space: ‘Quicksand’ ‘blender’ ‘lagging’ stagger diagonally down the page with great space between the words. Readers feel the weight of her weariness.
‘If I drew, I’d draw that invisible energy waterfalling out of ME. Identities are called into question / chronic sorrow, more loss of material possessions.’
Stunningly beautiful word choices generate a music that ‘lift us, pulling and floating us.’ Her word play begins with her title. Symptoms of her disease are ‘unbecoming’ behaviors to many around her. ME/CFS itself is a process of ‘unbecoming’—a shedding to recreate. ME, which can stand for myalgic encephalomyelitis also serves as a pronoun for Bishops’s continually new made self ‘ME.’ There are elves inside selves: some help, some harm. It is an embodied dance the poet describes with haunting precision.” Lori Anderson Moseman, periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics, Spring 2026 https://periodicityjournal.blogspot.com/2026/03/lori-anderson-moseman-unbecoming-by.html
About Jaguar’s Book of the Dead:
“Jaguar does not care for your reality’s boundaries. Jaguar eats them.
Poet and teacher at Texas A & M International University, Suzette Marie Bishop transforms the world around her with her poetry. The rippled cover of Jaguar’s Book of the Dead is delightful to the touch and reinforces Bishop’s mission to captivate her readers by providing them with a tactile as well as mentally stimulating experience. Readers will ‘…sink lower on your couch…’ and watch ‘…windows steaming up with…jungle humidity…’ as they become engrossed with Bishop’s work.
The entire collection is dedicated to jaguars as the animals they are and to the powerful role they have played in human mysticism throughout the years. ‘Jaguar Remembers You Leaning over Him, Weeping’ is a piece that is as supple and elegant as the dying animal is honors. ‘I know the way to the Underworld…,’ the deceased Jaguar says soothingly.” Berry’s Poetry Book Reviews https://berryherwithpoems.wordpress.com/2020/02/28/jaguar-plays-with-magical-realism/
About Hive-Mind:
Washington Independent Review of Books
“The attraction–and immediacy–of these narratives lies in the way Ms. Bishop effortlessly tie[s] together landscape and memory, and past and present. Ephemeral passages stitched together like a quilt; persistent as bees in their millions of miles flown and in their endless milligrams of collected pollen. Here is the epiphany of natural cycles repeating, crests and troughs connected in an endless flow.”
“Overall, the environmental concerns and personal frailties and epiphanies weave together to form a substantial statement, and, simultaneously, a diary.” Robert Kostuck, Concho River Review, Fall 2015, reprinted in Tishman Review
“Bishop . . . takes a look at bees and beekeepers. She highlights colony collapse disorder, the environmental disaster causing honeybee colonies to die. As she learned more about the disappearance of bees, she realized she wanted to raise awareness about the devastating implications of the problem . . . Are we the beekeepers or are the bees the humankeepers?” Marla Elsea, Phi Kappa Phi Forum, Fall 2015
About Horse-Minded:
“In ‘You Rush past My Windshield One Night and I Say a Prayer for You,’ a mountain lion barrels through the speaker’s headlights, ‘paws gripping and releasing, / long tail raised for balance’ (3-4). Bishop is the panther running across the headlights of the car she’s also driving. This is how we find ourselves, moving against our own movement, moving against our old Northeast, finding that the rules are irrelevant to achieve that magic starburst–motion against motion, the ghost and the living in the same body–and being right there, Bishop sends us a postcard without an address. It’s a nice, well-lit message.” Barrett Warner, Concho River Review, Fall 2013
“This is food for the feast. Especially interesting is the use of multiple typographies to articulate meanings. Vivid use of the page and a constant weaving and reweaving of story/tone/story show what is exceptional about this poet. She plays with words and lets meaning mysteriously evolve.” Grace Cavalieri, Washington Independent Review of Books, Summer 2012
About She Took Off Her Wings and Shoes:
“This lovely contest winner will speak to women as surely as poets have spoken to the author, Suzette Marie Bishop. And the poets do speak to her. Much of her work is inspired by the work of others. With an eye and pen for detail, readers looking for poetry with a delicate touch are certain to love Bishop’s book.” Carolyn Howard-Johnson, Amazon.com Customer Review, Dec 13, 2003
“I am often accompanied by a great blue heron, which has haunted me from the time I first read Suzette Bishop’s collection of poetry, She Took Off Her Wings & Shoes . . . when it rose from the pages on massive wings. This mystery bird does what Bishop’s poems do for me (or to me), keeping me charmed, challenged, and, frankly rather tough, for one must be tough to read Bishop. Hers are poems of witness and speak of difficulties like mental illness, sexual violation, a hysterectomy, divorce, homelessness. In all, these poems are honest and unflinching, and they ask the same of us. They are also poems that do whatever they want, and this is something I particularly love about them . . . No camp owns these poems. They are experimental and collagistic, with startling splices of disparate discourses. They are distanced but also confessional. They are feminist but also feminine.” Nancy Dunlop, 13th Moon, Vol. XIX, 1&2, 2005
“This is a deep, resonant, and rewarding collection; the gradual unfolding of its take on luck becomes, by the book’s final lines, thrilling, as the stacked-up imagery of the previous 70 pages—bats, Rome, ruins, gynecological procedure, houses, cacti—spill over into a kind of juxtapositional grand-finale. Fortune-cookie text is combined with and eventually becomes personal text; personal text becomes universal, the stuff of luck in everyday life . . . If you don’t believe poetry can be resonant and thrilling, this is the book to change your mind.” Sean Chadwell, LareDOS, January 2004
“She writes with her tongue and her fingertip, carving the spaces between her conscience and the inevitable dream.” The New Formalist, Vol. IV&V, 2005
About Cold Knife Surgery:
“Throughout her ordeal this woman replayed her identity through her memory, revivifying the virtual circumstances of her existence from earliest childhood through these latest rememberings, as she struggled to discover some legitimate reason to attempt to cope, and thereby to cope. She writes clearly, excellently, and says what must be said.” David Castleman, Mandrake Poetry Review, Volume III, Numbers 2 & 3, 1999
“…Bishop’s poetic journey is a story larger than its original intention. The poem transcends and becomes art.” Michael Basinski, Lucid Moon, July 1999
“Cold Knife Surgery wasn’t simply an academic exercise or a self-indulgent excursion. It was, and is, what was gained. It, in a word, is your soul.” Gordon Hilgers, The Word: Monthly Guide to the Arts in Dallas, May 1999
“What a book. I read it cover to cover. …Cold Knife Surgery is a hot, touching book of power and elegance.” Grace Cavalieri, host of “The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress”
“Bishop carefully weaves her poem together, interpolating personal narrative with dreams, and demonstrates a wide tonal range. [Cold Knife Surgery]… has the ring of truth, and it is beautifully written.” Blair Ewing, Wordhouse: Baltimore Writer’s Alliance News, December 1998
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