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The Immaculate Conception Mothers' Club

Koenisha Publications presents a new collection of David's poetry. The book contains 60 new poems. It is available November 16, 2010 in bookstores, poetry venues, readings, and online (www.amazon.com and www.koenisha.com)


>click here to order book from amazon.com

Praise for

The Immaculate Conception Mothers' Club

These are the poems of a good and decent man, a good husband, father, friend, and the teacher you wish you had had. The poems are vital, accessible, winsome, and alive. Poem by poem we feel as if we are walking through the days with Surette, his poetic sensibilities fully attuned to each moment, as his wife wraps his sweatshirt around a beached loon and takes it back to a creek to set it free, as his brother tells him hard medical news at a Bruins' game, as one of his former students now back from Iraq spills his heart out in a bar looking for someone to fight. There is something distinctly American about these poems. They are filled with that longing and restlessness as they look hard at loneliness, loyalty, loss, and redemption. In one poem he writes about a month of "rosary risings," in which he and his wife awake, "one whispering, "I'm still here," the other answering, "So am I." You can find that affirmation here. You can find your life in these poems.
John Hodgen, author of Grace

In the preface to his Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth famously called for a poetry that sounds like a man speaking to men. If you translate that aesthetic from his day to the blue collar New England towns of our own then you'll be able to hear and celebrate the blunt-edged, dramatic lyricism of David Surette's The Immaculate Conception Mothers' Club. By turns praising, funny, heartbreaking and combative, Surette's poems sing without apology in the vital language of his working class upbringing in Malden, Massachusetts. "I hope you hear my neighborhood. / My hometown. / My mother and father. / Grandmothers and grandfathers. / School and church. / The rink and the playing fields. / The Irish and Acadian, / Fishermen and farmers. / Gaelic and French," so he addresses pugnaciously the privileged poetry teacher in "Weekend Workshop" who can hear only the strains of a gas station attendant in his voice--"Regulah or high test?" True to itself and its origins, deeply human, Surette's voice IS "gas," as the Irish say, full of the kind of poetic energy that takes you places. Definitely high test.
Daniel Tobin, author of The Narrows and Second Things

Easy to Keep, Hard to Keep In

Koenisha Publications presents a new collection of David's poetry. The book contains 51 new poems. It is available in bookstores, poetry venues, readings, and online (www.amazon.com and www.koenisha.com)

>click here to order book from amazon.com

Young Gentlemen's School

Koenisha Publications presents a collection of David's poetry, including all the poems from his three chapbooks plus ten new ones. It is available in bookstores, poetry venues, readings, and online (www.amazon.com and www.koenisha.com).

>click here to order book from amazon.com

Poetry Available On-Line

Good Shift
Third chapbook with more poems on love, god, hockey, horses, Malden…
>click here for selected poems

David's second chapbook.
>click here for selected poems

Whisper the Past
Poems about Nova Scotia,
the search for Surettes.
>click here for selected poems

A Chapbook about growing up in Malden, Massachusetts.
>click here for selected poems

Praise for Easy to Keep, Hard to Keep in

The horse knows why it runs.

The horse remembers

arrows in its hide,

cart and carriage,

plow and harness,

mine shaft and battlefield

The first time I read these lines I penciled in the margin next to them, Steal this! I found myself doing the same thing again and again as I kept reading. There's a music and an inevitability and a crystal clarity to David Surette's work that makes me grateful.

- George Bilgere

These are fresh, incisive poems that sparkle with the salt of the everyday. Surette writes with a quick, acquisitive eye and self-effacing voice that invites his reader into the small but resonant dramas of his childhood, his adult family life and his job as a high school English teacher in eastern Massachusetts. With a remarkable lack of "irritable reaching", Surette records the vivid, quotidian narratives of his life with a universal, direct appeal.

- Chard deNiord

David Surette is a steward of humility in its many forms: from his blue-collar Acadian roots to his lowly yet noble farm animals. With charm and affability, yet neither of these at the cost of implicit depth, this collection impresses by setting out to do just the opposite: simply and un-self-consciously befriending the reader.

- Frannie Lindsay

In EASY TO KEEP, HARD TO KEEP IN, David R. Surette continues to mine a life rooted in small New England towns, and brings up gold. His subtle wit, his precision of eye and ear and language lay bare universal truths of living in this world. Through these poems his town becomes our town, our home, and it is with joy and gratitude that this reader keeps returning to them

- Kevin Goodan

Praise for Good Shift

I like his poems a good deal — they're sharp and lucid and look outward as well as inward. I can hear them as human speech and I bet he reads them well out loud. They work on the reader’s or listener's pulse, the only true test as far as I'm (and also Mr. Keats) concerned.

- Thomas Lux, poet, author of The Cradle Place (Houghton Mifflin, 2004); The Street of Clocks; New and Selected Poems, 1975-1995

Praise for Muckers, Grinders, Shapers, Hangers, Hackers, and Huns:

"I was late for work today because I picked up this book and it wouldn't let me go. First it was a baby watching a monarch mobile in sunlight, then the pony that wouldn't let the rider work out his frustrations, the smells in the car the guys always used, the house where every room had a name. Fortunately, it's a small book. I only missed one class."

- Michael Brown, poet, professor, host of The Boston Poetry Slam, author of The Falling Wallendas, Susquehanna and The Man Who Makes Amusement Rides.

"Where are the edges, dangerous and beautiful, that ask and answer?" The edges David Surette searches for can be found in Muckers, Grinders, Shapers, Hangers, Hackers, and Huns, his latest collection of poems. Surette navigates language as surely as his daughter sits "The Tryout" pony. This is poetry.

- Valerie Lawson, poet, author of Ribbon Anvil, co-host of The Boston Poetry Slam

For Malden…

This is a man after my own heart. Dave writes exactly the kind of poems I would write if I could just write shorter poems. He writes about real things in real words. He writes about the people he grew up with, and they sound exactly like the same people we all grew up with. But, somehow, out of all that feels so familiar and often so funny, he draws your eye with seeming effortlessness to the surprising and the poignant. He tells the stories we have been overlooking in our lives.

- Jack McCarthy, poet, author of Grace Notes, Breaking Down Outside a Gas Station - Live CD, and Say Good Night, Grace Notes

David has a wonderful wit and evokes the terrible and triumphant life of kids. "And me I was just another prisoner."

- Pat Schneider, poet, author, playwright, librettist, founder/director of the Amherst Writers & Artists.

David was the chief lyricist for the popular Boston band Boys Life.

>click here for Boys Life