When no one is around I say hello to Space. I decide it is the tarmac. Or a flashing plug-in skyline. Or the Great Nebulous Anxiety hovering over my limits. I don’t know you, I say to the words chasing its morphing forms. But it is not useless to compose fables. I hold tight to my fear of the possible. The empty unit beside this one. The opening out of the corridor.
— from The Book of Space
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A collection of 21 poems, The Book of Space (Tammy, 2021) converses with spaces of time and page, architecture and city, Earth and galaxies, interrogating what stands between the isolated self and interconnection with the wider world.
BUY: contact Suzanne
“In The Kingdom of the Subjunctive, the cruel weights of history are freshly remembered while computer-age white noise is subject to an almost lascivious forgetting. The center will not hold; the apocalypse is, was, and will be. Suzanne Wise's imagination is assertive and surprising; her sensibility extends from the deliciously funny to the austerely tragic. The music of electronic angst wilds through these poems of displacement and vicarious existence, through exposures that are reflective in both senses of the word: they encompass external mirrors of the self and ruminations that boil within. This is a poetry of info-shock confessions and blasted narrators in which urban glut and debris are compounded into monuments to nation-state and private soul, in which female space is both indeterminate and profligate. Suzanne Wise's work bristles with the struggle to define and comprehend the absurd component of evil and despair.” —Alice Fulton
“I love Suzanne Wise’s poems because they’re droll and cavalier, magnificent and terrified all at once. With all the invisible poise of masculinity—which she doesn’t care to possess—she manages to flip responsibility governing her poems so that what’s secretly driving them feels like everyone’s problem. And that seems like a grand success. As if a vast and almost patriotic distress signal were being sent out.” — Eileen Myles
“The first book of the poet Suzanne Wise, The Kingdom of the Subjunctive takes declarative leaps into the imagined; it expertly carves into gleaming surfaces to examine their astonishing interiors, as well as the tools of examination.” — American Letters and Commentary
BUY: Indiebound / Alice James Books
I want to talk about not talking
I am always saying to the doctor
even when I change the subject.
This Talking Cure listens past smooth talk and resolved narratives to capture static, noise, silences, circumlocution, and the unruly language of the body. Released by poet Janet Kaplan’s Red Glass Books in 2014, the chapbook features the cover image of a stutter’s sound waves, pink inlay papers, and gray pages. Poems included were previously published in Bone Bouquet, Bomb, Green Mountains Review, Guernica, and Catch Up.
BUY: contact Suzanne
A slice of East Village noir, The Blur Model features blood, fish, and one stylish and mysterious death investigator. This excerpt of a novel-in-progress was published in 2004 by Belladonna*, the renowned feminist collective founded by poet Rachel Levitsky.