Susan Jordan moved to Devon in 2011, having spent most of her life in London. She loves living near Dartmoor and the sea and can’t imagine now how she survived in a city for so long.
 
She has an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University, where she specialised in fiction. She had always written poems from time to but started writing poetry more seriously after taking Roselle Angwin’s Elements of Poetry course and then joining Jo Bell’s online poetry group ‘52’ in 2014. Her poems have been published in a number of print and online magazines including Acumen, Ink, Sweat & Tears, The Journal, Lunar Poetry, Obsessed with Pipework, Prole, Snakeskin and the Agenda online supplement. Her poems have also been published in anthologies including The Chronicles of Eve (Paper Swans Press), Well, Dam (ed. Rebecca Bilkau), Skein (Templar Poetry) and Moving Images (Before Your Quiet Eyes Publishing).
 
Susan enjoys being part of the local poetry scene and is a member of Moor Poets, a network of poets in the Devon area. Her first collection, A House of Empty Rooms, was published by Indigo Dreams in autumn 2017. Her second collection, I never think dark will come, was published by Oversteps Books in February 2021. Her pamphlet Last of the Line, published by Maytree Press in November 2021, won the publisher’s Three Trees Portfolio Award.
 
Her most recent pamphlet, Tasting the Sweet Cold, was published by Mudlark Press in 2023.
 
About A House of Empty Rooms:
 

A House of Empty Rooms is filled with deftly crafted, nuanced poems in which Susan Jordan explores the meaning of family, of mortality and change with tenderness and integrity.

 

Rebecca Gethin

 
 

A House of Empty Rooms, I think, is an outstanding first collection, full of loss and sadness, but not without humour.

 

Jenny Hamlett

 
 

About I never think dark will come:
 

Susan’s poetry takes you right inside herself, into a world full of colour and surprising spaces, occasionally self-deprecating ones. I love her magnifying eye for detail. A great title for a first-class collection.

 

Caroline Carver

 
 

Susan Jordan’s poems are a unique and compelling blend of the meticulous and the visionary, the observant eye and the reflective mind, analysis and empathy. Particularly powerful here are … the challenges impressively met in picking up unpromising subject matter and making it astonishing.

 

Alasdair Paterson

 
 

About Last of the Line:
 

Susan Jordan’s pamphlet Last of the Line leads us through her childhood; the Jewish way of life that the family only partly embraces is richly described through its vocabulary, ceremonies and traditional food. ‘We sipped Passover wine […]/the rich deep red burning in our chests’. She is unflinchingly honest and tender about her relationship with her parents even into adulthood: how difficult it can be to love and be loved. Her mother’s cooking gives life, but Jordan says of her, ‘I kept killing you with silence’. Communication with her father is also difficult: ‘We […] never crossed/the border into each other’s land’. This evocative and beautifully composed pamphlet is full of immediacy, powerful testament, and startling last lines.

 

Julie-ann Rowell

 
 

About Tasting the Sweet Cold:
 

These poems offer us vivid, sensual memories of being young. The mysterious customs, fears and longings of childhood are honestly evoked in language that is always well chosen and precise. This is generous and fearless exploration, and its particularity, so well remembered, will touch the child in every reader. Susan Jordan leads us on into student days and young adulthood, its colours, flavours, styles, then shocks us with a remarkable final poem. This is a collection that keeps giving and will repay many readings.

 

Christopher Southgate