“It is natural that under the words of poems like these, a geography of forms. Transnational, existing between countries and cultures, the poems of Susan Atefat-Peckham were part of the charting of a unique landscape. Like the poems of Meena Alexander, Shreela Ray, Reetika Vazirani, and Agha Shahid Ali, her poems have languages, locales, food, and fabrics fully other than the familiar material of American poetry. We have been waiting a long time for new poems from Susie, and here they are, found in files by her son, another poet of life and the mind. Rumi taught us that every poem must be followed by silence. We must listen carefully to the words we have been given. We are not bereft. This is a cartography of love and wonder. Cardinals, cardinals everywhere.”

Kazim Ali, author of 'The Voice of Sheila Chandra'

“These poems burst from ‘the deep dark black mouth of memory’ where Atefat-Peckham navigates borders of existence and effectively sings herself back into this world. ‘Nothing dies in places we’ve left behind,’ she writes, then lifts up the moon at her feet and gives it ‘back to the empty sky.’”

Sholeh Wolpé, author of 'Abacus of Loss'

“I first met Susan Atefat-Peckham through her poems—a kindred spirit navigating the spaces between. I wrote to her and our correspondence was one of a shared searching. When I learned of her death, I reached out to Joel Peckham, her husband, asking him to lend me some of her poems for the anthology, Let Me Tell You Where I've Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora, which he generously offered and which opened each section of that book. How beautiful, more than sixteen years later, to see a whole collection of her work tended and lovingly brought into the world by her young poet-son, Darius . . . and to ‘think of what it means to be left behind, think of the scream, so loud it comes out in silent bowls shimmering with the hands of those who survive.’ This collection is a gift. These poems, ‘quiet with negotiation’ and a ‘shimmering’ connect the deep ‘distances between us.’”

Persis Karim, poet and editor

"Darius Atefat-Peckham’s mother, Iranian American poet Susan Atefat-Peckham, died in a car accident when he was three years old. He brings us her second collection, Deep Are These Distances between Us. . . These elegiac poems reverberate with life, a reminder that the poet lives on through her work. . . ."

Harriet Books

"The distances between Susan Atefat-Peckham and us may be great, yet hers is unmistakably a poetry for our perilous times. Susan Atefat-Peckham is 'still / in the universe.' She lives on via her poetry, which provides readers with a 'place of repeated / comfort where even scars will brighten.'"

NewPages

"It is the aliveness of her poems, the voice speaking from and reaching across the distance, that gives us Susan Atefat-Peckham’s poetic vision made anew even in her bodily absence. And all the more sweet and tender it is because it is enabled by the mystery and beauty of her son’s poetic vision to make her alive again for us."

World Literature Today