Poetry
THRALL
By Susan Gevirtz
Echoing person, place, or thing and adding a question to the definition of a noun, THRALL begs yet another question: is the person a verb or a verb-scape. The poet dreams the poem as three-dimensional things or places that we can enter and and touch yet never hold.
We could try to find an answer to the first sentence of Thrall, “is person place or person,² if we were sure it¹s a question. But I take the book as an enigma, its key word never spoken. Even the guess coming nearest might well land us in “deciphretude,² not a healthy sounding state. Best no doubt to leave all the words as they are and, well ... just listen. It¹s a beautiful book.
—Keith Waldrop
“Is person place or person,² writes Susan Gevirtz. This provocative statement ¬ it is not a question ¬ leads us through Thrall to the land of Intelexa and outlying realms. If Alice in Wonderland and Wallace Stevens have a daughter, here is her primary residence. She spends “each month the chapter of a year² “drinking of this aquarium water tincture and thereby knowing something happened. Thus reaching for the dictionary.² The Reader can hope to find herself in this Looking Glass, surrounded by the good neighbors Intellect, Lexicon, Law, and Light, opening into deep communication with sensitive and nervy maps of reading and response, a finely-tuned and attuned charting and exploration of the “world of written words.² There is no finer dwelling than this.
—Stacy Dorís
Susan Gevirtz is a San Francisco poet and writer. Her books include Hourglass Transcripts (Burning Deck, 2001); Spelt, a collaboration with Myung Mi Kim (a+bend press, 1999); Black Box Cutaway (Kelsey Street Press, 1999); <Narrative's Journey: The Fiction and Film Writing of Dorothy Richardson (Peter Lang, 1996); PROSTHESIS : : CAESAREA (Poets and Poets, 1994); Taken Place (Reality Street, 1993); Linen minus (Avenue B, 1992); and Domino: point of entry (Leave Books, 1992). Many essays have appeared in literary magazines and scholarly journals. With Greek poet Siarita Kouka she runs The Paros Symposium, an annual meeting of poets and translators from Greece and the USA.
2007 108 pages $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-942996-63-1
