Susan will read first, and then Alison will read second.
And I'll introduce Susan to begin.
Susan Briante's two books of poetry
include Utopia Minus and Pioneers
in the Study of Motion, as well as the chapbook,
The Market is a Parasite that Looks like a Nest.
These are fascinating collections.
Utopia Minus deals directly with urban decay,
and the brokenness inherent in the made
spaces of our contemporary American landscape.
A landscape that, in many of our cities, suburbs, and exurbs,
is based on sprawl and excess, on human and financial
speculation.
A landscape that forces us to appropriate
the scale that living in such a place imposes on us.
The car we must own to travel through this geography.
The gross and delicious gas station food that fuels us.
The houses that we build to provide a refuge
and escape from it all.
The almost Gothic afterglow of the lived experiences
of these physical spaces becomes a subject.
The effect of living this way, the effect
of making these spaces in the first place--
are we complicit?
Are we culpable?
More recently, in the chapbook, and in a forthcoming book
The Market Wonders-- this is a good title, The Market Wonders.
The market wonders.
What does it wonder?
The Market Wonders, coming out in 2016 from Ahsahta Press,
Susan has adopted the proclivities of the stock
market as her muse.
Detailing the human-like actions we
describe it acting out, observing the lyric
ways it moves, as if the Dow Jones Industrial average were
sentient, independent, self-determined, unknowable,
affecting us every day like weather.
Even poem-like in how it moves up and down, the pressure often
on how it ends.
As if it were something we cannot control, and yet,
ironically, we are the only actors acting upon it.
A fascinating perspective given that the crisis of 2008
has the potential to be the defining financial moment
of some of our lives.
During a talk Susan gave this summer at Hotel Congress,
she said these words about the evolution of her interest
and process, and they stuck with me.
Quote, "I started to think about the financial crisis
as a crisis of storytelling and representation."
Not a crisis-- that's the end quote--
not a crisis of business or morality or economics,
but of language, and how we order it.
How we tell the story.
Of course, business, moral, and economic acumen
are critical players here, but equally so
is how we discuss these concerns.
It turns out, how we talk about the things that matter to us
sometimes define our existence, and how
we relate to one another.
This is perhaps why God made English majors.
This is the territory of art and of poetry,
and of poetry's capacity.
And this is what I return to Susan's work
for again and again.
I'm so excited for her new book, and I
hope you anticipate it as much as I do.
Please help me welcome my friend, Susan Briante.