More Lilith Walks by Susan M. Schultz

In More Lilith Walks, Susan M. Schultz, with a photographer’s eye, perfectly captures the strangeness of the day-to-day living of a townhouse community next to a cemetery that doubles as a tourist attraction on the Windward side of Oahu. The microaggressions. The peripheral tragedies. The small miseries. Often, these are vignettes of a frustrated dog walker while a presidential election looms. However, there’s an element of skillfully rendered absurdity of a world that reads as if has been traumatized but simply doesn’t remember how or why.

—Chris McKinney, author of The Water City Trilogy and The Tattoo


Lilith walks again, and the world of dog walking again reveals our utopian potentials and intractable angers and divisions. Susan Schultz is poetic witness to a world that is both utterly mad and yet weirdly inhabitable. There is nothing real but contradiction. She walks through a civil war but has conversations that convey love and connection; for, after all, she talks with people with dogs. There is no writer in this country today better attuned to how people live and arrange their personal lives in a historical moment that’s collapsing. More Lilith Walks is War and Peace in tiny, successive frames of social encounter. The dog brings people together. Schultz listens, speaks, sees, and writes. The two Lilith books, Meditations, and I Want to Write an Honest Sentence are, for me, the most powerful political/poetic observations that have been written in these poisoned years of Trump.

—James Berger, The Meaning of Poems: Selected Poems (as) Poetics


In a style as disarmingly casual as her daily saunters with her dog Lilith, Susan Schultz has assembled a delectable treasure chest of human encounters. Each walk is a poem, complete with volta-like turns, crafted with a photographer’s eye for the telling detail and a poet’s ear for the lyrical in everyday speech. Lilith Walks reminds us that even the most ordinary walks can take us outside ourselves, across political boundaries to the common grounds of aging, loss and mortality.

—Ann de Forest, Editor, Ways of Walking


Susan Schultz is a photographer, and that’s what she’s up to with her words here too, capturing luminously ordinary moments in clear-seeing prose. I live in this neighborhood too, know it all the better now (for betterand worse), and will now pay more attention to the eucalyptus that coughs up tar, the Buddhas at odd angles in gardens, the artistic patterns in dumpster rust.

—Tom Gammarino, King of the Worlds


“Let’s go—” Denise Levertov writes in “Overland to the Islands”—“much as that dog goes, / intently haphazard.” More Lilith Walks is a splendid chance to get out of your house and into an urgent errancy: tugged forward by an engaged and curious intelligence on a journey that mixes dérive and quest. Where Guy Debord meets Don Quixote—and Richard Brautigan narrates the result—Susan Schultz and Lilith wander in and out of confrontations, connections, and conversations, many of which will make you say, with one of her interlocutors, “I can’t believe that conversation even happened!” But Schultz has, as always in her work, a photographer’s steadiness and the courage to face the actual with exemplary acceptance. And, as Levertov notes in her poem, “there’s nothing / the dog disdains,” which makes, “’every step an arrival’.” An important contribution to our understanding of America, and a vivid document of a particular time and place, More Lilith Walks could also be titled, The Spectacle of the Society.

—Laura Mullen, EtC.


"More Lilith Walks is a great pleasure to read. Vignettes, micro-novels, about being human in Hawai`i, in a neighborhood full of characters, with a dog. Schultz writes knowingly, inhabits her language snugly, but no fancy theory here, no big ideas, no angst, no posturing, just daily living, daily words. Unheard of!"

—Norman Fischer




Susan M. Schultz, having retired from the University of Hawai`i, now walks Lilith and takes photographs on O`ahu and the Big Island. She is author of many books of poetic prose, including Dementia Blog, and She’s Welcome to Her Disease: Dementia Blog, Vol.2, (Singing Horse Press), as well as several volumes of Memory Cards. Her most recent books are I Want to Write an Honest Sentence, from Talisman, Meditations: December. 2019-December. 2020 (Wet Cement), Lilith Walks (BlazeVox),and I and Eucalyptus (Lavender Ink). For over 22 years she edited and published Tinfish Press. She is a life-long fan of the St. Louis Cardinals. 


Book Information:

· Paperback: 110 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-495-6

$22