What do you do with a loss so deep and so wide that you fear you might drown in its waters? How do you begin to create a new life, a new self, from the pieces that remain? For Susan L. Leary, whose brother died in 2020, writing poems was an integral part of her process. Dressing the Bear (Trio House Press, 2024), winner of the Louise Bogan Award for Artistic Merit and Excellence and shortlisted for the Arthur Smith Poetry Prize, is the stunning collection of poems Leary wrote shortly after her brother’s death, many of which address him directly. As we bear witness to Leary’s longing and to the sharpness and reach of her pain, we learn “the beautiful singularity” that was her brother and the depth that was their relationship. Whether you call them elegies or love letters, Leary’s poems are testaments to connections beyond time, beyond death.
Leary’s previous collections include A Buffet Table Fit for Queens, Contraband Paradise, and the award-winning This Girl, Your Disciple. I spoke with her via Zoom about the nature of grief, unanswerable questions, and chasing the afterlife.
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The Rumpus: Dressing the Bear is an extraordinary collection of poems that read like love letters to the brother you lost in 2020.What made you decide to write a book about him?
Susan L. Leary: I’ve always had rose-colored glasses with him. I’m a very cynical person, and can be a very angry, judgy person, but none of that has ever been directed at him. I know how troubled he was, how difficult of a life he had, and how he probably needed to be held accountable in more ways. I have always had this bleeding heart for him. What characterized our relationship more than anything else was we were always talking, always in communication, sharing the daily drama of our lives, the minutiae, all the trivial matters, but also talking deeply about how we felt about ourselves, how we felt about our place in the world. What does it mean to live a life? What does it mean to live a good life?
As complicated as the relationship was, it was easy. We really liked one another. I think more than anything, the book is a conversation between me and him, or a continuation of the one we were always having. I would be lying if I said we did not talk about the possibility of this book because we did. We also talked about the possibility of his death. It hung there all the time between us, and so, often with tears in my eyes, I would say, “If you die, I’m going to write a book about you.” And he would say, with such sincerity, “Sue, you’re going to write the shit out of that book. You are going to do it.”
With addiction, you feel responsible for their survival, but along with that responsibility, you feel helpless. I found in my grief, if that is what we want to call it, I’m not helpless anymore. Grief is kind of a responsibility that I can make good on. Part of why I wanted to write this is because I said I would.
My brother was an extremely clever, smart, creative, witty person. It’s hard to impress me, make me stop in my tracks and go, “Wow,” but he was a real teacher. I learned from him all the time. I would marvel at his perspective. I also wanted to capture his language, so I’m constantly quoting him. A lot of times, I’ll italicize his lines, or I might even say very outright, “My brother says _______.” There are other lines in the book, though, that are his. The reader would never know—I wanted to keep these lines for myself, keep them for us—it’s part of the conversation that only my brother and I can know.
Still, I don’t think I’m just having a conversation in the book with Brian. I’m trying to create conditions that would allow for it. I’m speaking, but is he listening? How can I make a space for him to listen and to respond? How real or reliable is the direct address? Am I speaking into the void? Or do I have his ear? If I have his ear, how do I assure myself of this?
Rumpus: When I hear you speak of conversations about each other’s lives, I see an image of you holding up mirrors for each other. In “If, Elsewhere,” the first poem, which feels to me to be a sort of prologue, you and your brother are on opposite sides of a river: “I call to you / but you have forgotten / your own name . . . That you might finally / leave me, Brother, let me / tell you who you are.” In the process, are you learning more about who you both are?
Leary: I love how you said that we’re kind of mirrors for one another. He would definitely agree with that. I think we were very, very similar in so many ways that only we knew. With poetry, sometimes I’ll ask myself, “Why do I spend time writing?” Everyone will say, when you’re writing, you learn what you think. That’s true for me, but I’m most drawn to the page when I’m desperately trying to convince myself of an idea I want to believe in, but just cannot accept.
In much of the book, I struggle with questions: “Where is my brother? Does he exist in an alternate reality? Does he know he’s dead? Does he know I love him? Can he hear me?”
I’m really chasing the afterlife. I want to believe he hears me, that he knows he’s dead, that all those realities are true. But I doubt so hard. I just can’t overcome it. I really want all that desperation to transform into some kind of faith.
There are a couple poems in the book—“If, Elsewhere,” is one of them—that, when I go back and read them aloud, I believe he hears me. I feel him. It’s interesting that I do, when I read that poem, because there’s distance there. Here’s this water, here’s this river. We can’t reach one another. We can see one another. We can’t communicate. The very thing that characterized our dynamic has been taken from me, but there’s intimacy in that distance that cannot be denied.
Rumpus: Are you giving him permission to do what he needs to do next, whatever that looks like, something you may never see?
Leary: What I wanted for him was self-love, autonomy, independence. Do what you want, lead the life you want to live, but do it in a self-affirming, not a self-effacing way. I want that so badly for him now. Here’s permission to go be who you are, who you’ve always been, and I love you.
Rumpus: Did you write about him before he died?
Leary: A little bit. In my first collection, Contraband Paradise, there are a few of what I refer to as “the brother poems.” I also wrote one piece of nonfiction about him. “Heat” is the only poem in this book written when he was alive. In the summer of 2020, he served ninety days in county jail for addiction-related offenses. He kept a journal there with the intent that I would write an accompanying poem for every entry. We wanted to write something together, but he died eight days after being released.
They say you write the same poem the rest of your life. I think I’m going to be writing this particular poem for the rest of my life. Even now, I’m in the middle of a project, trying to utilize his journal. I’m sending his stuff out. He actually got published in the Indiana Review. I’m trying to keep his voice alive.
Rumpus: Is your writing different as you experience different stages of grief?
Leary: What I have learned in writing the book is the first word everybody will attach to it is “grief.” It’s so interesting to me, because when I was in the midst of writing all these poems, I can’t say that word ever crossed my mind. Because it keeps being mentioned to me, I answer: “Well, what the hell is grief? What is it? Are there stages to it?”
I’m telling you, this word [grief] stumps me, but I’m trying to get a lasso around it. If this is how people are receiving the book, I want to understand what I am doing that might create that response. In my mind, addiction doesn’t discriminate, but grief does. What I mean by that is, my utterly broken heart, my sadness, my longing, my despair, my love, whatever you want to call it, that has to be some recognition of the beautiful singularity that was my brother. Grief knows what made my brother my brother. It knows every detail so precisely, so distinctly.
Maybe in this way, grief is the most humanizing, most discerning, most honest set of glasses we wear. That is how I try to make sense of it for myself because I don’t know what grief is.
Rumpus: “In the Weeks after My Brother Dies,” speaks of a very different grief than some of your other poems. You’re in a time of thrashing about, of not being able to find a moment of stillness. You have bad dreams, but when you wake up, the waking is the nightmare: “… I have nothing / in common with myself anymore. When I get the urge / to write, I do not write. Rather, I ask strangers in the produce / section if they believe in life / after death …”
Leary: I did that all the time. People would look at me like, “What?”
I would wake up haunted. I hated nighttime. You got me thinking that maybe grief has many lives. The final lines of “If, Elsewhere” are: “That you might finally / leave me, Brother, let me / tell you who you are. . . .” That was one of the first poems I wrote. Then, a couple of years passed. I knew the book was nearing completion because I was fearing that completion. I thought, “I don’t want him to leave me. I don’t want to be left. I don’t want to leave him.” In “The Birds, They Too, Are Clean,” I was like, “Well, let me try to address this fear of the book being done, of leaving, of being left.”
In the end, I say, “… you’ll never leave me . . . The birds are washing their feathers with the water from our eyes.”
Grief has many lives. It feels like an annihilation of self. I’m in this slow reintegration process back into the person I was before suffering this loss, but that person is gone. I don’t even recognize myself sometimes. I’m like, “Who? What?” So, maybe grief is the self, going through these different iterations, trying to settle back into its own heart.
Rumpus: We feel this questioning so deeply in your poems—they have conversations with each other in “If, Elsewhere,” “Roll Call,” “The Birds, They Too, Are Clean,” and then two tiny elegies that bookend Section Two of the collection. Are the faces, or lives, of your grief speaking to each other? Trying to make things work out?
Leary: I can see that. I know I’m after something, but sometimes I don’t know what I’m after. I think what I’m really after is just I want him back.
I’m so confused by life, and sometimes when I say I’m confused or I don’t understand, or I don’t know, all I’m really saying is I wish things were otherwise.
Rumpus: You ask a lot of questions in this book—not so much “Why?” but “How?”—“How to make sense of this? How do I get out of bed in the morning? How do I go through the day? How do I live now?” Did writing these notes, these questions, to your brother and to yourself, help you find your way?
Leary: I want to say yes, but I don’t know. There are a lot of “How?” questions. I’m very much obsessed with where he is, as well. The book became this place I could create to put him when I want to visit him. Writing these poems was a way for me to spend time with him.
When I told one of my workshop leaders, Nathalie Handal, that I don’t know if I should be writing about this all the time, she said, “Susan, you have to write about this because there are things you can know right now in the present that you will not be able to know at a distance. You will never again be five days removed from his death, thirty days removed, forty-five. And how you’re feeling, what you’re thinking. If you don’t capture it, it will abandon you. It will leave you.” Without her saying that, I don’t think this book would’ve been written. Her permission was very helpful to me.
Now, when I look at this book and I return to it, I say, “How did this get written? Who wrote this?” I don’t even know how this happened because I can’t even remember that person. That version of myself was so inside this. Writing the book clearly must have helped move me forward in some way, because the version of me that was able to write these words, helped me move forward and figure out how to sit inside the sadness and still see beauty. I don’t recognize this person, but it is me. I know it’s me. Which goes back to what you were saying, the many faces of grief, the many lives. Wow, I’m learning. I’m learning here.
Rumpus: “Dressing the Bear”: Can you tell us about that poem and how it came to be the title for the collection?
Leary: Originally, the title of the collection was Only the Finest Track Stars Smoke Newports, a line straight out of my brother’s mouth and the title of another poem. Nearing the end, when I submitted the collection to Trio House, I said, maybe it should be Dressing the Bear instead.
He was eleven or twelve when he had a crush on this girl. We were in the mall and he’s like, “I’ve got to go into Build a Bear.” I was like, “Why?” His answer was, “I have to make a bear for Brittany.” So, we went in. What I described in the poem is essentially what happened. I’m just watching him, and he’s so into what he’s doing but also a bit embarrassed. There was this moment when the builder is supposed to take the bear’s little heart and kiss it before placing it inside the bear. [My brother] was like, “Don’t tell anybody about this.” In that moment, twenty years ago, I knew that day was important.
I can’t say I’ve ever had a day like that again in my life, where I stopped myself in my tracks and thought, “This is a meaningful moment. I don’t know why, but this feels like a day that will somehow capture the entire narrative of my life.” I had that thought, actively. I can place myself there; I can see his face; I can see us. There’s also his language, in “Dressing the Bear,” about the sunrise and the sunset. I chose Dressing the Bear as the title because, figuratively, I’m dressing the bear in each poem, the bear being my brother.
It’s an ongoing process. It’s a tender one. It’s gentle. In every poem I’m attempting to care for him in the most delicate way: clean him, stitch him up, remind him I love him, tell him who he is. I think I am trying to, as we were saying earlier, dress him for this new life, where he can have permission to be himself with love and autonomy. Maybe I’m also trying to dress myself, to exist in this life without him. Dressing the Bear speaks to our relationship, our dynamic, the tenderness that was always, always there. That’s why I went with this title—it’s the perfect one.
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Author photograph courtesy of Susan L. Leary
