Susanne Antonetta (born 1956, in Georgia), is a poet and author. Antonetta uses a pseudonym, Suzanne Paola, for her poetry. She is perhaps best known as the author of Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir. ISBN 1582431167 In 2001, Body Toxic received recognition as a 'Notable Book' from the New York Times, and for making Amazon.com's list of top ten memoirs that year. A portion of Body Toxic was published as an essay entitled 'Elizabeth' that was declared a 'Notable Essay' for 1998 by Best American Essays . She has published several prize winning collections of poems, including Bardo, a Brittingham Prize winner, and the poetry books Petitioner, Glass, and most recently The Lives of The Saints. She currently resides in Washington with her husband and adopted son.

Antonetta was raised among the Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey, the setting for Body Toxic (and the haunt of the legendary New Jersey Devil), in one of the most environmentally contaminated counties in the United States. Antonetta's memoir merges her personal and familial sagas with historical accounts, politics, and environmentalism, creating a tome that is at once exceedingly intimate and yet unmistakably political. Body Toxic depicts an American family in the midst of what Antonetta perceives as the wreckage of the American dream.

In this terrifying and haunting tale, Antonetta writes about the unspeakable, of how the poisoned landscape of her New Jersey childhood devastated her body, causing cardiac arrhythmia, seizures, severe allergies, and making her reproductive organs useless. She recounts the story of the Radium Girls, details aspects of the frequent nuclear and industrial waste debacles in New Jersey, and relates just how these events tainted the lives of her family and neighbors.

Antonetta's memoir compellingly evidences how environmental effects upon her body - caused by toxic assault - cannot simply be attributed to genetic vunerability, random chance, or recreational drug use. Vignettes depicting colossal man-made environmental disasters are woven into her story, accenting the recurrent medical catastrophies she endured, including endometriosis, rampant thyroid tumors, a quadruplet pregnancy (sans fertility drugs) that ended in miscarriage, numerous growths on her liver and ovarian cysts that necessarily had to be removed, all embedded in a time line repeatedly punctuated by manic-depression, just for good measure. Ironically, the latter condition was treated with psychotropic drugs, some of which are derived from the very same dye chemicals dumped, sometimes wrecklessly, into the environment of southern New Jersey.

External Links

• Gelmans.com - Woman Looks Back At Her Toxic N.J. Youth
• Body Toxic excerpt - Chapter One