Description
Susan Terris’ Take Two: Film Studies is a series of dazzling poems about pairs who are heading in one way or another for trouble, disaster, or death. Each poem is a kind of filmic scene, which has a few movie terms embedded as parenthetical script directives. The text spins back and forth in time from the era of Beowulf to that of Jacqueline Kennedy. There are traditional couples like Abélard & Héloïse or Bonnie & Clyde. But many of the pairs are unexpected: Sancho Panza & his donkey Dapple, Mary Shelley & her monster, Picasso & a portrait of Dora Maar, or Lady Macbeth & King Duncan. Expect the unexpected in this volume. No matter what you think you know about a pair, you may be in for a dark surprise.
It takes two sticks to burn says the folk adage, and Susan Terris has found the incendiary potential in these stylistically inventive, wildly assorted and mostly disastrous duos—each pair of “takes” revealing the ways we are undone by one another. And if there’s an icy wind fanning these fires, it may be the passage of an unseen avenging angel, driving phrases like knife thrusts across the spaces ‘til: lights lit masks off champagne [it’s a wrap]
Eleanor Wilner
There seems to be no limit to the range of experience and empathy in the far-reaching poems of Susan Terris. Her wisdom, dazzle of language, and amazing appetite for risk and “dark surprise” make us treasure her work.
Shirley Kaufman
About the Author
Excerpt
Susan Terris’ most recent books are MEMOS (Omnidawn Publishing) and GHOST OF YESTERDAY: NEW & SELECTED POEMS (Marsh Hawk Press). She is the author of 6 books of poetry, 16 chapbooks, 3 artist’s books, and one play. Journal publications include The Southern Review, Colorado Review, and Ploughshares. A poem of hers from FIELD appeared in Pushcart Prize XXXI. A poem from MEMOS, first published in the Denver Quarterly, was selected for Best American Poetry 2015. She’s editor of Spillway Magazine and a poetry editor for Pedestal Magazine. http://www.susanterris.com
Take Two: Tears
I violate self-satisfied
by the perfection of distortion [abstract] her three
breasts round hole in a childless body she is
butchered crying I love the blurred tracks from
eyes too close together yes a nose for an ear
a doormat some women are and the other Dora
thinks I left for Franc?oise women are machines
for suffering but the real Dora Maar [alternate ending]
my muse is here the woman in tears always
two-dimensionally mine so each day in one way
or another I back her against a wall gaze at those
bank-fish eyes crazed body [angle] and hang her
then boldly slash her with my name Picasso
