Joy Is So Exhausting

Susan Holbrook's second collection of poems is a joyful fusion of the experimental and the experiential, the procedural and the lyric. Punch lines become sucker punches, line breaks slip into breakdowns, the serious plays comical and the comical exposes its own roots in the political, the psychological and the emotional life of the mind. Many of these poems import text from elsewhere - home inspection reports, tampon instructions, poems by Lorca - in a series of translations, transpositions and transgressions that invite a more intimate and critical rapport with the written word.