Poetry. Winner of the 2002 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition. This series of poems is loosely based upon the experiences of the mathematicians of the Scottish Café, who lived and worked in Lvov, Poland (now the Ukraine), a center of Eastern European intellectual life before World War II. "In the poems of THE SCOTTISH CAFÉ, Susan H. Case creates a metaphor for the persistence of the life of the mind and the imagination. There is no theme more important for poetry to address in our time, when that life is imperiled by barbarisms from within and without. By recalling with celebratory joy the vigor, the messiness, the courage of that life as it was once lived in a terrible time by the patrons of the Scottish Café in Lvov, these poems do us a very great service."—Charles Martin

The Scottish Café

Literature & Fiction

Case, Susana H.

Poetry

Slapering Hol Press

In the late 1600s, in Salem, Mass., unruly young girls were diagnosed medically as victims of witchcraft. Eventually, more than 200 people were accused of practicing witchcraft. Twenty were executed--nineteen by hanging, one by crushing. Salem in Séance by Susana H. Case is a narrative exploration of these shocking events, depicting this tumultuous time with powerful detail.

Salem in S Ance

WordTech Communications

Elvis Presley's Hips &amp; Mick Jagger's Lips is rock and roll in poetry. The poems cover a range of subjects related to music, organized into three sections: "The Honey Thing," (relationships); "Mood Alteration," (substance abuse and shifts in emotion); and "Write a Song About It," (the music business and its relationship to other aspects of life). Each poem also departs in unique ways from rock and roll, its lyrics and history.

Elvis Presley's Hips & Mick Jagger's Lips

Anaphora Literary Press

Poetry. 4 RMS W VU, Susana H. Case's latest collection, consists of poems focused on human connections in their various manifestations, including: romantic relationships, both whole and broken, parent-child relationships, and our relationship to death and loss. The work uses the metaphorical floor plan of a New York City apartment, though the rooms are somewhat of a departure from the conventional kitchen and living room, to organize mind and memory. The view alluded to in the abbreviated parlance of a real estate listing is outward, but especially inward, where sometimes it's necessary to struggle with true understanding, to try to blast through the bricked-up barriers to insight regarding motivation and action. Organized into four sections or rooms, Susana H. Case's poems examine a bedroom where a woman's current husband is situated, the family room in which her parents, as well as herself as a child, reside, the storage room of memories of a first husband and various lovers, and a dying room for those others already lost, as well as the author's intimations of her own mortality. Loss is part of the past, as well as the future, and this collection contains the constant recognition of how vulnerable are the things we hold dear. Still, Case is defiant in the face of the mistakes of the past, which she looks at unblinkingly. As she moves from room to room, she discourses on love, sex, dogs, music, travel, movies, and everything that she believes makes a good life possible, the life she wants and intends to live. She is walking through the rooms of her memory in order to find answers to the question of how to live life fully, without regret at the end. "The poems in 4 RMS W VU, like most of Susana H. Case's work, demand full participation—no watching here—that we live in their apartments, wear their clothes, down to the 'denier nylon.' At the end we're a little shaken, but a lot wiser. Susana is a daring poet, not so much for the sake of issuing challenges, but more to the cause of poetry itself; she defies one to bring the whole body and soul, and deny no part of this experience called living."—Mervyn Taylor "4 RMS W VU is a poetic open house in which Susana H. Case guides us through the rooms of the heart. In poems addressed to husbands, lovers and parents, Case shows how the past, the curious details of daily life and wonderings about the future all weave together endlessly, how nothing is ever really lost—not a loved one, not a hurt—if you can remember. In her moving new collection, we see how this poet's art is an act of holding on in language that is sure-footed."—Matthew Thorburn "Susana H. Case's 4 RMS W VU superimposes an intricate map of a lover's mind on the floorplan of a New York City apartment in poems that never shrink from the 'weep and stink of everyday brutality.' Moving from room to room and year to year, 4 RMS W VU passes through meditations on life with dogs, the metaphysics of lipstick, and the peculiarly American primal scene of the isolating, moving, colliding car, in square footage inhabited by a woman with the brio to ask, as final prayer—'Let me blow a lot of fuses.'"—B.K. Fischer "In these poems, Susana H. Case captures a vision of New York that can no longer be seen but in memory. Filled with characters frenzied by love, desire &amp; hope, 4 Rm w Vu reminds us not only where we're from but also who we are."—Gerry LaFemina

4 Rms w Vu

Mayapple Press

Elvis Presley's Hips & Mick Jagger's Lips is rock and roll in poetry. The poems cover a range of subjects related to music, organized into three sections: "The Honey Thing," (relationships); "Mood Alteration," (substance abuse and shifts in emotion); and "Write a Song About It," (the music business and its relationship to other aspects of life). Each poem also departs in unique ways from rock and roll, its lyrics and history.

Poetry. The middle section of this new poetry collection from Susana H. Case consists of ekphrastic poems inspired by the crime scene dioramas of Frances Glessner Lee, the "mother of forensic science." How appropriate, for this entire collection is an exercise in forensics, as Case deploys her poetic powers of detection to investigate and interrogate life in its minutest details; and all too often she too is depicting acts of violence, committed against women, against migrants, against the marginalized. Early on she questions the "puzzling utility" of her "street light eyes," but those eyes miss nothing, and it seems as well that she has missed no opportunity to learn from what they have seen, whether it is recognizing that "everything was happening" even while it seemed to her adolescent self that "nothing nothing nothing happened," or taking from an encounter with a baby skunk in a tent the lesson "Don't move. / Don't make a sound." Fortunately that silence yields profound words here, as in the title poem where a quintessentially quirky New York City experience of, quite literally, a dead shark in a subway car provides an occasion for meditation on death and destinations, what we see and what we don't, and how long we can journey to end up not so far from where we began. "Remind me none of this will kill me," she writes in one poem--except sometimes it can, and does, and she does not flinch from putting even the "shriveled flesh" of a dying friend into her poetry. If this sounds grim, it can be, but the sure touch and precision of Case's language elevates her work from any sense of morbid voyeurism. Nor does she spare herself from this examination, as in the closing poem where she grapples with her own physical fragility and the limits of language to express it. Recalling how she came to say "icebox" for refrigerator from her mother, she remembers a time she "did not have the vocabulary," and how since then she learned "Words deceive, the way love is often inarticulate." Case is certainly not the first poet to distrust language, the tools of her craft, nor the first to wonder about who is listening, "you people, / you whom I don't even write for." Those of us who are listening, for whom she is writing even when she is not sure herself, are fortunate indeed to receive these poems. It is perhaps an outrageous pun to call this a "Case report," but as an account of her poetic forensics it is an essential document of our time.

Dead Shark on the N Train

Broadstone Books

If This Isn’t Love

Poems from The Lockdown

Others, And

Maynard, Trevor

Canzi, Mariangela

Zhang, Cigeng

Barney, Cary

Byrne, Geraldine Moorkens

Rubino, Robert Eugene

Malik, Neetu

Heffernan, Syble

Independently published

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