[lapsed insel weary]

Just reached 150 poetry “reviews” (squibs? blurbs?) on Goodreads. It’s soothing, not addicting: literary knitting. You don’t often get a chance though, there or anywhere, to know what the author thinks of what you’ve written. So I thought it’d be interesting to ask Susana Gardner to respond to what I said about [lapsed insel weary], her new book from The Tangent Press. Here’s the initial reviewlette; I’ll put up Susana’s responses over the next few posts:

Emily Dickinson had her dashes, Chelsea Minnis her dots; Susana Gardner emerges in her debut collection as the laureate of the bracket. In Gardner’s hands, the bracket works in the poem the way loss and separation do in real life: interruptions but also expansions of meaning, which open up possibilities for new forms of connection. Elegiac but hopeful, experimental with a yen for the Victorian feminine, [lapsed insel weary] creates a thorny lyricism where no breaks are ever clean enough to isolate, and the dead are always with us, as palimpsest or whisper—“Love-, has no beginning or ending but Only/needs for Continuance.”