MOMENTAN AUSVERKAUFT
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Product Identifiers
PublisherFour Way Books
ISBN-101961897261
ISBN-139781961897267
eBay Product ID (ePID)28068283670
Product Key Features
Book TitleMonster Mash
Number of Pages120 Pages
LanguageEnglish
TopicSubjects & Themes / Death, Grief, Loss, Women Authors, General, American / General
Publication Year2025
GenrePoetry
AuthorSusan Browne
FormatTrade Paperback
Dimensions
Item Height0.4 in
Item Weight6.1 Oz
Item Length9 in
Item Width6 in
Additional Product Features
Intended AudienceTrade
LCCN2024-035148
ReviewsIn her canny and wonderfully approachable new poems, Susan Browne offers a worldview that is at times mournful, at times foreboding, but always grounded in tender and intimately rendered humanity. These are poems of place, as California's fraught ecology and climate are front of mind, but they are also poems of time in which the speaker's considerations of her own mortality and temporality offer us striking observation and poignant perspective throughout. Monster Mash is a gift rich with nostalgia, insight, and wisdom, and I am grateful for it. --Jaswinder Bolina, Susan Browne's poems are songs to the suffering earth, to love in the face of the pitiless moon, merciless angels, to the past and the future, a mother's death and what comes after, a father slipping slowly away, youth and aging, old loves and new. A whole life is stuffed into these pages, you can hear it breathing as you read. --Dorianne Laux, I love this book's brash diction, its reckless artfulness, and wicked humor, mechanisms of survival as the speaker contends with very real personal, family, and global traumas. "I put on my inferno mask / over my pandemic mask / & topped it off with my snorkel mask / against the river of cinders," Susan Browne writes. "A swarm of locusts had dismantled my car." There it is--the timing of a great comedian, and the devastation at the center of every magnificent joke. The result is a book of poems that captures, for me, what it feels like to exist in a culture and a world falling apart at the seams. "[W]hat can any of us do / to stop the butchers / because we have to be butchers / to stop them," she writes, elucidating the conundrum of now so perfectly, I want to paint it on my bedroom ceiling, to be read while tossing and turning. I've come across few poems that get at the experience of embodiment quite like Browne's description of "The mammogram room where I flop my boob / Onto the plastic tray. Flop is not exactly accurate / Concerning these tater tots." It's like sitting across the table from your best, most outrageous friend, cry-laughing at her inventive, raw aesthetic as she describes her first period, sitting on the toilet waiting for her mother to deliver "the white rowboat / I'd have to wear between my legs once a month / for the next 38 years," or portraying herself as an "erotic locomotive / on a quest for the grail in the Valhalla of penises." There is more to Monster Mash , much more. It tracks the span of a life, the early loss of a mother, and exposes the wisdom that comes to those who endure long enough to earn it, that "the intelligent thing is to offer everything / to infinite love." --Diane Seuss
SynopsisSusan Browne (Winner of the Four Way Books Intro Prize in Poetry judged by Edward Hirsch) has crafted her fourth collection of poetry into an incendiary inventory of life's urgency and vitality in this late-stage capitalist moment. In "Air Quality Index: 500," while Browne "[wonders] what the government [is] doing during this era of cannibalism," "a bald eagle [flies] by with its head on fire." Monster Mash explores the surreal lyricism of this phenomenon--when what sounds like hyperbolic symbolism is actually just the news. Even if the national bird aflame makes a fitting metaphor for the state of our body politic, it also transcribes a true emergency in the poet's direct sight--wilderness and civilization smoldering alike in the California wildfires. Amid the existential scale of climate and economic crises, Browne's poems deftly illuminate how we must also navigate the daily necessities of our individual lives: tending to aging parents, grieving those who pass before us, "[waking] to the river of air conditioner noise," "cleaning the litter box / or driving around the locked-down town, / looking for a house [you] can't afford or a job that doesn't exist." In the words of Dorianne Laux, "Browne's poems are songs to the suffering earth, to love in the face of the pitiless moon, merciless angels, [and] to the past and the future." After all, Browne reminds us, not all of our wandering is aimless. The speaker at the wheel "wants to show you what's still possible / out by the river, the egret & geese, / the fast-moving current, that autumn is here / & there, there, there / are dark pools of coolness under the leaves."
LC Classification NumberPS3602.R737M66 2025
