Poet and Author

Susan Azar Porterfield was born in Chicago to a Lebanese father and a mother from rural Arkansas. She was the first in her family to attend college. She has a Ph.D. in Nineteenth-Century British literature and an M.A. in art from the Courtauld Institute in London.
She received an Illinois Arts Council Award for Poetry and was featured on the Chicago WTTW 11, Arts Across Illinois program. She is a recipient of a Fulbright to Lebanon.

Books & Publications

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Audio Samples

All God’s Creatures

by SUSAN AZAR PORTERFIELD

Read All God's Creatures

On second thought, God decided to make humans
in such a way that to them, pigs tasted
like heaven. Cows too.

As well as other miscellaneous beings—
All very random, really. Who wound up in the mouth,
molded to meet the mmm, mmm good, molecular/genetic urge

of God’s own making. While others were, you know,
just meh. Sure, God could’ve gone the other way,
contrived so no one seemed yummy to anybody else,

(Word is, God could do anything God wants.)
but God liked seeing the struggle, human-creatures beating
against the chest of their own God-fashioned natures,

because after God had performed the world,
wasn’t much else to do. And being God, God foresaw
that God would get bored, so the suspense kept God’s

attention. How would it all turn out? Stay tuned to see if humans
finally grow more angelic. Will they swing that sledge hammer?
Wring that neck? Watch them rationalize torture

to pop some flesh on the grill. Best of all, God
gets to play the free-will card, built right in. What a piece of
work is man. How noble in reason. In apprehension,

yep, how like a god.

Death of a Nine-Month-Old Girl, Not My Own

by SUSAN AZAR PORTERFIELD

Read Death of a Nine-Month-Old Girl

How to enter.
A hook to hang why. As if, I’m home,
time for tea. And so, home.
As if.

Start again.

How to enter the open door,
door being always open. No
inner no out.

Who lied? Who said fair?

Who, in god’s name, said soul?

There’s a father so in love,
he’s not afraid to die.

Starlings, darlings,
children of stars?

each in the flock connected, adjusting
a wing’s bite of air
as the wing of the neighbor
adjusts

and then again and then again

the swoop rises, the swoop twists, it falls,
rises
rises.

In Kibbe, Susan Azar Porterfield movingly portrays the seeking of cultural roots in Lebanon and in her father’s former village of Kousba. What she offers is no less than a thrilling narrative of how we come to love the world, even among maimings, wars, and threats of translated confusions. These poems are political in the deepest sense—they thin the membrane between personal and public, demonstrating with clarity, grace, and even restraint, the reciprocity between one’s interior map and boundaries drawn in ink or blood.
—George Kalamaras

In her poem “Perhaps I Can’t Explain” from In the Garden of Our Spines, Susan Azar Porterfield sustains an intensity of vision touching on the mystical. And in so many other pieces, rich with strong imagery and compelling music, she crafts a most unique collection, with great sureness of touch.
— Lucien Stryk

In Dirt, Root, Silk, poems create enchanted spaces rich in memory and imagination. Susan Azar Porterfield’s keen eye approaches reality slantwise, capturing details under a magnifying lens, and endowing domestic scenes with universal dimension. A subtle complexity of emotion arises from the convergence of multiple planes of consciousness, artfully opening doors to deeper meanings. These poems are multifaceted gems...
— Hedy Habra

Susan Azar Porterfield writes intelligently and surrealistically in the same poem. Her poems often circle subjects with strong imagery and inventive language, with original verbs and striking juxtapositions. Dreams, houses, bodies, sleep, death, trees create a web of connection. Her examination of the concepts of god and soul is both a questioning and a quest.
—Marge Piercy

The lush musicality in this book... The unflinching eye... The articulate passion.... will leave you craving more.

— John Bradley on In the Garden of Our Spines

Books of and About Poetry

Voice/Poems

Coming July 2025

Kibbe

The pieces that make up KIBBE document a life spent journeying "Between Two Worlds": the author's America and the Lebanon of her family heritage.

In the Garden of Our Spines

With an intensity of vision sometimes touching on the mystical , Susan Porterfield crafts poems rich with strong imagery and compelling music.

Dirt, Root, Silk

The poems in Susan Azar Porterfield's DIRT, ROOT, SILK dig deeply and with precision into the hidden layers of human relationships.

Zen, Poetry, the Art Of Lucien Stryk

Those who know Lucien Stryk's poetry well will find this collection particularly gratifying. Like journeying again to places visited long ago...

Susan's Amazon Profile

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