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Baby
Sublimely cunning, Baby is personal, universal; sparse, vast. Sara Sutterlin’s third collection of poetry is an examination of intimacy, a gesture towards redemption, and a demand for victory over the peril of love.
- GenresPoetry
56 pages, Paperback
First published August 20, 2017
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
September 30, 2017
This book is a snack-pack of lil' poems and shards like:
I swear
all these fucking
poems
just to say
there is dead sex
A love we know nothing about
and there is the door
I swear
all these fucking
poems
just to say
there is dead sex
A love we know nothing about
and there is the door
September 10, 2017
Really liked this, but I think I liked I Wanted to be the Knife a bit better.
January 26, 2018
There are such potent gems here, stark on each page. I found myself tearing through the book, which actually felt like one long poem, not a series, in a very good way. The one thing that wasn’t necessarily to my liking was the enjambments - it would have been interesting to see some of these pieces as prose poems, to assess whether that added or detracted from their devastating slyness. Still, a treasure.
November 17, 2017
I'm between flights on my way to NFLD, in HFX with about twenty minutes to spare; I'll be brief here.
Sutterlin is a real good poet. I liked her previous Metatron title, and I like this book as well. The book is of course very well composed (aesthetically), gold on red, "Let's talk about the private" tattooed along its back cover to give an overarching theme direct focus.
My key criticism of "I wanted to be the knife" was that for all the bodily references in the book, the physical/visceral felt almost cheap in its reduction to sexual context. Here, the sexual context is expansive (in a good way), the speaker on edge and angry, a kind of balance between being hard on one another and working with one another.
Some great titles (e.g. Implied Minotaur), and some great lines (e.g. the kitchen smells / like Last Night / It eats where / we eat / And we let it).
There is a general sense that as much as the motif is "private->public," much of the sustained narrative (it feels as though it is one speaker, their sustained meditation on a relationship) involves referencing the relationship indirectly, in things that happened before and may/may not happen again (e.g. Sit shiva for me / and / get a little hard / remembering the / Last time).
I actually think "Baby" lacks a lot of visceral language and imagery that its predecessor seemed to use to potent effect, but it blooms here now and then, shy, and dominant in the final poem in this image of total control and ecstasy (that I won't spoil in this review).
More hypothetical, more mysterious, less physical, but still high stakes in the realm of love and sex.
Everyone should pursue reading Sutterlin's work, and that's an endorsement I don't tend to make lightly. Literary-minded folks, casual poetry fans, angry femmes, the public, the private, and all the rest in between!
Sutterlin is a real good poet. I liked her previous Metatron title, and I like this book as well. The book is of course very well composed (aesthetically), gold on red, "Let's talk about the private" tattooed along its back cover to give an overarching theme direct focus.
My key criticism of "I wanted to be the knife" was that for all the bodily references in the book, the physical/visceral felt almost cheap in its reduction to sexual context. Here, the sexual context is expansive (in a good way), the speaker on edge and angry, a kind of balance between being hard on one another and working with one another.
Some great titles (e.g. Implied Minotaur), and some great lines (e.g. the kitchen smells / like Last Night / It eats where / we eat / And we let it).
There is a general sense that as much as the motif is "private->public," much of the sustained narrative (it feels as though it is one speaker, their sustained meditation on a relationship) involves referencing the relationship indirectly, in things that happened before and may/may not happen again (e.g. Sit shiva for me / and / get a little hard / remembering the / Last time).
I actually think "Baby" lacks a lot of visceral language and imagery that its predecessor seemed to use to potent effect, but it blooms here now and then, shy, and dominant in the final poem in this image of total control and ecstasy (that I won't spoil in this review).
More hypothetical, more mysterious, less physical, but still high stakes in the realm of love and sex.
Everyone should pursue reading Sutterlin's work, and that's an endorsement I don't tend to make lightly. Literary-minded folks, casual poetry fans, angry femmes, the public, the private, and all the rest in between!
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November 6, 2019THIS BOOK IS A BARN BURNER
November 21, 2020
some favorite poetry. sparse and biting
February 19, 2024
Sara Sutterlin’s two books published by Metatron Press are excellent additions to any bookshelf. Their brevity makes them easy to revisit, and they always manage to surprise me in new ways with how much is compressed into so few words.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews