What do you think?
Rate this book
Ideal Suggestions: Essays in Divinatory Poetics
How does one participate (read and write) from within the membranous precinct between our multiple bodies, from within the larger rhizomic field of resonances, where much is sounding and also unsounded? By employing various "divinatory generators" (instructions, methods, trances), the essays in IDEAL ESSAYS IN DIVINATORY POETICS genuflect to practices that celebrate engagement with uncertainty while cultivating strategies through which one might collaborate with both rupture and rapture. Literary Nonfiction. Film. Religion & Spirituality.
290 pages, Paperback
Published October 1, 2017
About the author
Selah Saterstrom
9 books112 followersSelah Saterstrom is the author of the novels Slab, The Meat and Spirit Plan, and The Pink Institution, all published by Coffee House Press. In 2016 Essay Press will publish a collection of her essays on Divinatory Poetics. She is the Director of Creative Writing at the University of Denver.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
October 29, 2017
This is Selah Saterstrom's first book of essays, and it provides a lot of insight to her three published novels. Drawing on 19th century New Thought texts and divination within the tradition of the Spiritual Church Movement, Saterstrom delves into the complexities of hermeneutics and writing. Composed to the page and lyrically beautiful.
April 25, 2022
“…my mother…believed that no matter who you were reading for—the local weed dealer or the mayor’s wife—what everyone wanted to know, more or less, was the same thing: they are not bad people, and they are worthy of being loved” (x).
“When a maker ceases before its fossil, demons tend the greasy dummy in the basement, Memory. Therein you’ll find a worthy prisoner” (30).
“Nobody ever really thought that Alexis got away because he was a hemophiliac but the whole Anastasia thing was a question for almost a century. ‘And now,’ Emily said while sawing the Vicodin in half with a butter knife, ‘it’s not’” (143).
“The homunculus green carves a keyhole through which a cathedral can be seen” (162).
One of the best books I’ve ever read. No exaggeration.
“When a maker ceases before its fossil, demons tend the greasy dummy in the basement, Memory. Therein you’ll find a worthy prisoner” (30).
“Nobody ever really thought that Alexis got away because he was a hemophiliac but the whole Anastasia thing was a question for almost a century. ‘And now,’ Emily said while sawing the Vicodin in half with a butter knife, ‘it’s not’” (143).
“The homunculus green carves a keyhole through which a cathedral can be seen” (162).
One of the best books I’ve ever read. No exaggeration.
March 28, 2020
YUMMERS!!! I feel alive from reading this book and the potential of language.
Saterstom, in her collection Ideal Suggestions: Essays in Divinatory Poetics sculpts the breakthrough dynamics on divinatory poetics posing writing as a crossroad between poetry’s interpersonal chronicles and the art of prediction. Saterstom defines the thread of divination as being “That stream…wherever you are, all of the time, in every grand place, and in every suffering pit.” The crossroad between intuitive channels and poetry offer “Narrative orchestrations … [that] collaborate with uncertainty [and] work in varied ways through the live wires tucked within a reader… This is also true of some writers.”
The collection is as rich for a “fork tongued” reader as it is for a writer and personally, as an divination obsessed writer, I acclaim to be a swept away by Saterstom’s pioneering, progressive instruction. She poses the relationship of divinitory’s “syntactical logics” and as a space of liminal boundaries, “the border between inside and out.”
Read the full review here: https://medium.com/anomalyblog/review...
Saterstom, in her collection Ideal Suggestions: Essays in Divinatory Poetics sculpts the breakthrough dynamics on divinatory poetics posing writing as a crossroad between poetry’s interpersonal chronicles and the art of prediction. Saterstom defines the thread of divination as being “That stream…wherever you are, all of the time, in every grand place, and in every suffering pit.” The crossroad between intuitive channels and poetry offer “Narrative orchestrations … [that] collaborate with uncertainty [and] work in varied ways through the live wires tucked within a reader… This is also true of some writers.”
The collection is as rich for a “fork tongued” reader as it is for a writer and personally, as an divination obsessed writer, I acclaim to be a swept away by Saterstom’s pioneering, progressive instruction. She poses the relationship of divinitory’s “syntactical logics” and as a space of liminal boundaries, “the border between inside and out.”
Read the full review here: https://medium.com/anomalyblog/review...
March 12, 2026
These essays are an experience to inhabit. Reading these, there was in me the feeling of a forgotten, sleeping, embryonic world within being roused, loosened into being. The six essays that comprise this collection include lyrical and intuitive explorations and difficult to categorize. These fragments, written in response to varied “divinatory generators,” scatter order. Similar to divinatory practices, they open the door to possibilities rather than certainty. They defy the logical brain and release you from its mandate. To attempt to pin the poetics down is to sever them from their essence, like pinning a butterfly to a cushion.
However, the opposite is not chaos. It is an invitation to descend and float among the disordered forms swimming in the void. To be, to allow, to receive, to read.
Each essay is accompanied by a note to orient the reader on the methods used to compose the pieces, ranging from rosaries to meditating on photographs. The three essays that stood out for me were “On the Rosary as a Structural Paradigm for a Mirage,” “On Writing from the Exclusion Zone,” and “The Tale of Brother and Sister.”
However, the opposite is not chaos. It is an invitation to descend and float among the disordered forms swimming in the void. To be, to allow, to receive, to read.
Each essay is accompanied by a note to orient the reader on the methods used to compose the pieces, ranging from rosaries to meditating on photographs. The three essays that stood out for me were “On the Rosary as a Structural Paradigm for a Mirage,” “On Writing from the Exclusion Zone,” and “The Tale of Brother and Sister.”
May 17, 2020
Not what I was expecting. Thought the essays would be more craft oriented regarding divinatory poetics but instead this is a collection of divinatory poetic pieces with some notes regarding the rituals or meditations employed to access each piece. I was really fascinated by this, and Saterstrom’s prose is scintillating and moves through so many textures and phenomena while rarely seeming pretentious or alienating.
My major takeaway was the means in which this will inform my own rituals for composing, and also the evidence of the extended timespans (many of the pieces here product of years of ritual work) under which pieces come through. Highly recommend even for those potentially put off by the New Age implications of divinatory poetics, which are not an essential buy-in to appreciate the essays.
My major takeaway was the means in which this will inform my own rituals for composing, and also the evidence of the extended timespans (many of the pieces here product of years of ritual work) under which pieces come through. Highly recommend even for those potentially put off by the New Age implications of divinatory poetics, which are not an essential buy-in to appreciate the essays.
October 27, 2019
If you’ve read Selah Saterstrom’s fiction you know it’s rapturous and visionary, hallucinations seen, cauterized and juxtaposed. In her latest book of non-fiction, Ideal Suggestions: Essays in Divinatory Poetics, Selah takes us behind the curtain on a epistemological journey of her process: writing as an act of divination that casts the writer into relationship and revelation with their work. Using meditations, pictures, vintage texts and even 80’s pop culture, Saterstrom does what she does best: collages her experience into an artifact that is fiercely individual and yet strangely universal.
September 29, 2019
Mind blown. This is one of those all-time-favorite-writing-resource texts for me. “Teaching divination workshops feels the same to me as teaching writing workshops.” -yes yes & more yes. There are so many expansive tributaries within these essays, each page a vein.
March 21, 2020
The first half of this book was so much more engaging to me than the second. I appreciate the approach to these essay projects, I just didn't find all the essays compelling.
March 28, 2025
Full of wonder and skill but that last essay is a revelation
June 21, 2018
Okay, so sometimes this book is pretty obscure. And yet: I've never read anything quite like it. The introductions to the essays were fascinating -- revealing the process, the thinking behind, the emotional life, some bizarre autobiographical details -- these are the moments that stuck with me most, though I enjoyed the products as well. I felt like I was in the presence of something otherworldly which I very much wanted to know and engage with, though sometimes it and I failed to meet. The language continually surprised me. "The Tale of Brother and Sister" was a favorite, and the spider stories!
"At any rate, post-spider-facing, we disbanded quickly. We went one way, the guys, the other. I credit Spider Face, as it is now known, for possibly saving us from some sort of negative encounter and creating an all-around weird experience."
"At any rate, post-spider-facing, we disbanded quickly. We went one way, the guys, the other. I credit Spider Face, as it is now known, for possibly saving us from some sort of negative encounter and creating an all-around weird experience."
July 7, 2019
To me, this is the kind of book you read over and over. It is about life through divination, but the reading process is also divinatory. I am happy I have finished it, only because I feel more fully injured to go back and sleep and sink in again.
Read
April 14, 2019Having only read The Pink Institution by Saterstrom thus far, this book of fragmented (sometimes) biographical essays reads as lyrically supple and tonally shadowy as I would expect. The essays ranged more than I expected--from the titular essays exploring Saterstrom's own divination in her writing process to the penultimate essay of two poetically compressed screenplays. I enjoyed how Saterstrom makes memories and her personal narrative feel divined onto the page, rather than mapped on the page. For me, that's the ideal of the essay, to try another way of seeing.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews