Praise for The Leaving: New and Selected Poems

Sue Ellen Thompson’s poems are wondrous creations of the real world of love and loss and desire—full of humor, full of tender precision. A single poem can meticulously and vividly contain the collapse of a marital or family history, or recreate a long desire. Her work is a delight.
—Michael Ondaatje 

Sue Ellen Thompson, while delineating the personal, never forgets that it’s arrangement, pacing, attention to sonics, that makes a poem a poem. Thus we are as engaged by the interplay of her language as we are by what it conveys. The vagaries of a love affair are offered from just the right distance, permitting insight to mingle with artfulness of narrative timing and the framing of effects. The Leaving is a pleasure and an achievement
—Stephen Dunn