Bøger af Susanna Rich

In Beware the House, poet Susanna Rich book-ends a wide-ranging collection of life story-poems between two Gothic, haunted houses, the first a surreal nightmare; the second, the mock-Gothic harpsichord-punctuated world of TV's The Addams Family. Unease, discomfort, and pain belong between two haunted places (confused birth and sardonic death), and Rich shares deeply personal accounts of her Hungarian-immigrant grandmother, obsessed in old age with Franz Liszt as an imaginary lover; and a disintegrating mother in the throes of dementia. At the center of the book are poems like glass shards of modern living, a keen and concise language palette turning the everyday into the extraordinary. Like a gypsy dance, these poems careen off common experiences - the grandmother's kitchen, the captive butterfly, a rebellion of trees, the driven car and the rubbernecked accident. And there are villains: the predatory boor repulsed, the unteachable student lesson-taught, the empty soul of the CEO laid bare, the bad president as piñata, the lecherous poetry professor, the restless Dybbuk.

"Surfing for Jesus" is a 3-D IMAX picaresque where J.C. Penney is the tabernacle; Walter Cronkite, a confessor; and drivers express their "Lordy-Lord" perfections by hugging the speed limit (exactly). These poems variously mourn, moon, lampoon, side-step, meditate, bash, tweak, and imagine their way through the thickets of contemporary commerce and religiosity-to find meaning with the Dalai Lama on the basement bowling alley of a defunct Jesuit seminary; with a sand dolphin and mermaid on a New Jersey beach; and with Jesus resurrected as a Laotian drag queen. Ultimately, "Surfing for Jesus" celebrates that the personal lyric is both a vehicle for and the destination of spiritual authenticity.