It's Good Weather for Fudge: Conversing With Carson McCullers [Paperback]

In Its Good Weather for Fudge: Conversing with Carson McCullers, Sue Walker imagines a friendship and conversation with McCullers as they share memories of two women growing up in the Deep South, McCullers in Georgia and Walker in Alabama. The past becomes the present in this poem that ranges from love and war to sickness and health, fudge and friendship. Its many allusions to the life and works of Carson McCullers make it a kind of poetic biography. Its Good Weather for Fudge is a brilliantly executed apostrophe in which Sue Walker addresses Carson McCullers as one Southern woman to another, but always in a poetic fashion that delights. I love the way Walker mingles their experiences as Southern women, even the way she objects to McCullers being buried in the North, when everyone should know that her body and soul belong to the South. Frederick W. Bassett, author of The Old Stoic Faces in the Mirror: A Life in Poems
The life and work of Carson McCullers -- her painful longing, her struggle with her damaged body -- echoes in Sue Walkers imaginative long-form poem, Its Good Weather for Fudge. Walkers writing is lyrical, narrative, scholarly and wise. She identifies with McCullers -- both growing up in the South, both studying music, both poets and writers -- and then moves beyond her, making a call for fortitude while accepting the impossibility of love, willing the lost hunters bones home to the South. A remarkable poem. Barbara Henning, author of A Swift Passage
I'm over the moon about this book. It loves you, through its language and depth and daring. Witty, sensual, defiant, celebratory! Don't let the fun fool you. The interweaving of texts makes me think of Eliot's 'Waste Land' technique -- here made more accessible, womanized, personalized, and astute about being and nonbeing, time and place, like Virginia Woolf. This is a brilliant book that knows no borders. Go there/come in . . . in . . . in. Sena Jeter Naslund, author of Ahab's Wife anl#”