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Master Suffering
Master Suffering moves between yield and command. Its bodies are supplicant yet seething―they want nothing more than to survive. But how does a woman survive? A younger sister has died, from a liver transplant, and the remaining speaker struggles through life, and grief, herself. A healthy body helps one to survive, but illness is one of the masters of this book. Faith can be a salve for the body’s inscrutable ailments, but in these poems, God is unreliable. This book is full of the questions and uncomfortable uncertainties that grief and the body bring; it is also full of speakers who are determined, and then unsure. The female bodies of Master Suffering want power to survive; they want to control and to correct the suffering they witness and withstand. But wanting can lead to suffering, too, and make speakers like Burroughs “Why / should I have wanted so much / as to threaten my being?”
- GenresPoetry
66 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
June 21, 2022
I did not expect to enjoy this collection of poetry as much as I did. The premise of bodily-oriented socially-aware poems is nothing out of the ordinary in today's poetic milieu, but the execution and precision of these poems set them apart. Only once or twice were the wording choices questionable, and only once did leftist political dogmatism shine through explicitly ("God Letter" #4). I appreciated that the author wrestled with the theological ramifications of loss, and the toll that takes on the body. Some of the poems, especially "The Wait", had almost excessively dense diction, while a few others near the end had a more conversational, run-on-sentence feel ("The Unbeliever").
But let's start at the beginning. The first poem "The Lovers" is a dense, grammatically creative (or should I say destructive?) way to start off the collection. It, like the rest of the collection, largely implies sexual acts, rather than stooping to the vulgar and obscene. Certainly, later poems reference bondage and other "edgy" sexual issues, but I was pleasantly surprised at the tact and indirectness that the author went about such topics. It seems the norm for bodily poetry today is to really immerse you in the visceral visuals, but this poem (and the collection as a whole) hints at you like the flowing of drapery over a body in a Greek marble statue. I do see a parallel here, where Burroughs' minute attention to detail and her patience with each poem reflects a sculptor's approach (which ties everything back to the cover artwork as well). Like the Greek statues, her bodily politics are chipped and cracked and missing limbs, albeit in a more entropic (Greek) way than the cover artwork (which was created pre-weathered). The poem ends on a sublime note:
No one said
it could be like this:
returning your partner's gaze,
learning his whole language,
realizing you, too, can be read.
The collection transitions from physical desire to the loss of the author's sister through liver failure. I'm still working out what we're supposed to get from placing these two things next to each other, but perhaps it's related to the whole "These times of woe afford no time to woo" line from Romeo and Juliet. Even amidst the dying of relatives, we still are embodied creatures with drives and with the need to eat and do other menial things. In this juxtaposition, there is also a recognition of the parallels between pleasure and pain, how similar those two sometimes look, how empathizing with one is related to empathizing with the other.
The first poem in the collection that really blew me away was called "Questions During Protest"; I read it several times, and I realized that possibly it was drawing parallels between "protesting" as the political act and "protesting" in the sexual sense of rape. If you read the poem with literal protests in mind, you get an entirely different vibe than if you read it with unwanted sex in mind. In the middle of the poem, Burroughs raises the issue of verbalizing the nonverbal, putting into words the bodily: "I name often my parts to clarify the object my body." And the author does a great job throughout the collection with anatomical references, and it's obvious that she not only dwells on the body but has studied it to some degree, both physically and academically. If we return to the two readings I posited, the line "I am an offering" becomes haunting, as either she's an offering to a man demanding to have her, or she's an offering on the altar of social justice, one among many animals at risk of being slaughtered during a protest.
This questioning of naming flips on its head in the next poem (Before Autopsy); whereas in "Questions During Protest", the entire endeavor of naming the unnamable body is raised, in this poem we are faced with an unnamed feeling, and this is precisely where poetry comes in, to put words to the wordless, put images to the unimaginable (such as your sibling dying). The second half of the poem is great:
I am overcome because it is unnamed and I want to call it. I call it and
want for it, hymn and rivet, to come. I will suffer desire; suffer it
Several of the poems in this collection share names, such as "God Letter" and my favorite name in the book, "Incidents in the Forgettery". The first of those is a heartbreaking and searing indictment of the tone of voice that a man used toward Burroughs who is cleaning up around the house. She ends the poem with:
I am welcome
for my utility, how I might serve, my
southern grace having grown me
toward the necessity of a tool.
This cleaning, as we learn in the third and last "Incidents" poem, is something Burroughs did obsessively after her sister's death because it was something she could control, some corner of the world which she had mastery over:
Is it any wonder I sank myself into duty? What else could be set right
at the insistence of my hand? When bearing into my training, I could
touch and turn matter into its most masterful self. My sister wasn't
made of such seams.
My least favorite was the middle (second) "Incidents" poem, which both felt more rushed and also used "body" in that all-encompassing way that contemporary radical leftists love using it (i.e. saying "black bodies" instead of "black people"). Most of the theological struggles that the author describes later stem from this prioritization of the (female) body over the male. One of the reasons she gives for rejecting God is that He is male (and He decided to incarnate in the God-Man Jesus). Interestingly, Burroughs berates the "rigid order of ritual" in traditional Christianity, but she religiously follows her cleaning rituals and her medication rituals. In "Wean and Stop" she realizes her body is dependent upon depression medication to operate somewhat normally; I thought this would help her realize her body's fallability and fickle variability (which would force one to consider such unchanging, objective things as God), but she doesn't go this route.
Contrary to leftist political doctrine, Burroughs makes a couple interesting statements about the group and the individual. At the death of her sister, she seems to have shrunk back into herself, regressing from the community to the individual. Relationships of all types run the risk of loss and the pain that causes. "Better / to have something of her own that can't be ghosted away" she advises, bitterly stating "Groups are an invention / of the womb--to whom do I belong?". This is the nihilistic complaint of those who never wanted to be born but who are here anyway; these same people are often skeptical of childbirth because those children may undergo the same hardships they did. Why not stop the cycle of suffering entirely? That's the question asked by Burroughs and others. If one is alone, sure you have loneliness, but that is often much less painful than the emotions which relationships can cause. Perhaps I'm reading too much into all of this, but I was just surprised by both of those above quotes.
Burroughs seems to have thought deep and long about the relationship of the body to other parts of life, and she has come up with some really creative connections. One such connection was the first "Dear Liver" poem which made a connection between her obsessive cleaning and the cleaning that the liver is supposed to do (but which failed her sister, even after a transplant). Burroughs in essence feels like she's been reduced to a single organ, one which can be fail and be transplanted and be rejected. It's really an amazing metaphor to tie the collection together.
Continuing on, we are met with the aftermath of that death, with the depression and suicidal ideation which sadly I understood quite well. Something I wasn't able to relate to was the author's insistance (after the death) that faith was something mythical because not grounded enough in the body: "I am a / con--cowed by the brute strength / belief takes, sight unseen". In light of the cliche "He'll never give you more than you can bear", Burroughs retorts "There's no good / reason why", but I think this misses the point. I just saw an edifying video yesterday which challenged us to change the question from "Why" to "Who", namely the suffering Christ, who comes to suffer with us. The author seems to think of Christianity in a more gnostic, non-corporeal way, when it really has a lot to say about physical suffering. Probably the pastors she had were incompetent and didn't point that out (instead saying she became an angel, which de-materializes the issue).
Despite this rejection and skepticism on the author's part, the collection ends on an exploratory note. She seeks for artifacts to prove the existence of her sister ("You see she wasn't a dream / although time tries to make her that way.") and to make sense of this tragedy we call life. The last words are haunting and hopeful:
There is worry that proliferates like operatic
throats. Signs happen such that
We are always gasping and awakening
And hopefully this loss that Burroughs felt will awaken something in us, will help comfort us, will even inspire us into kindness and away from religious cliche.
But let's start at the beginning. The first poem "The Lovers" is a dense, grammatically creative (or should I say destructive?) way to start off the collection. It, like the rest of the collection, largely implies sexual acts, rather than stooping to the vulgar and obscene. Certainly, later poems reference bondage and other "edgy" sexual issues, but I was pleasantly surprised at the tact and indirectness that the author went about such topics. It seems the norm for bodily poetry today is to really immerse you in the visceral visuals, but this poem (and the collection as a whole) hints at you like the flowing of drapery over a body in a Greek marble statue. I do see a parallel here, where Burroughs' minute attention to detail and her patience with each poem reflects a sculptor's approach (which ties everything back to the cover artwork as well). Like the Greek statues, her bodily politics are chipped and cracked and missing limbs, albeit in a more entropic (Greek) way than the cover artwork (which was created pre-weathered). The poem ends on a sublime note:
No one said
it could be like this:
returning your partner's gaze,
learning his whole language,
realizing you, too, can be read.
The collection transitions from physical desire to the loss of the author's sister through liver failure. I'm still working out what we're supposed to get from placing these two things next to each other, but perhaps it's related to the whole "These times of woe afford no time to woo" line from Romeo and Juliet. Even amidst the dying of relatives, we still are embodied creatures with drives and with the need to eat and do other menial things. In this juxtaposition, there is also a recognition of the parallels between pleasure and pain, how similar those two sometimes look, how empathizing with one is related to empathizing with the other.
The first poem in the collection that really blew me away was called "Questions During Protest"; I read it several times, and I realized that possibly it was drawing parallels between "protesting" as the political act and "protesting" in the sexual sense of rape. If you read the poem with literal protests in mind, you get an entirely different vibe than if you read it with unwanted sex in mind. In the middle of the poem, Burroughs raises the issue of verbalizing the nonverbal, putting into words the bodily: "I name often my parts to clarify the object my body." And the author does a great job throughout the collection with anatomical references, and it's obvious that she not only dwells on the body but has studied it to some degree, both physically and academically. If we return to the two readings I posited, the line "I am an offering" becomes haunting, as either she's an offering to a man demanding to have her, or she's an offering on the altar of social justice, one among many animals at risk of being slaughtered during a protest.
This questioning of naming flips on its head in the next poem (Before Autopsy); whereas in "Questions During Protest", the entire endeavor of naming the unnamable body is raised, in this poem we are faced with an unnamed feeling, and this is precisely where poetry comes in, to put words to the wordless, put images to the unimaginable (such as your sibling dying). The second half of the poem is great:
I am overcome because it is unnamed and I want to call it. I call it and
want for it, hymn and rivet, to come. I will suffer desire; suffer it
Several of the poems in this collection share names, such as "God Letter" and my favorite name in the book, "Incidents in the Forgettery". The first of those is a heartbreaking and searing indictment of the tone of voice that a man used toward Burroughs who is cleaning up around the house. She ends the poem with:
I am welcome
for my utility, how I might serve, my
southern grace having grown me
toward the necessity of a tool.
This cleaning, as we learn in the third and last "Incidents" poem, is something Burroughs did obsessively after her sister's death because it was something she could control, some corner of the world which she had mastery over:
Is it any wonder I sank myself into duty? What else could be set right
at the insistence of my hand? When bearing into my training, I could
touch and turn matter into its most masterful self. My sister wasn't
made of such seams.
My least favorite was the middle (second) "Incidents" poem, which both felt more rushed and also used "body" in that all-encompassing way that contemporary radical leftists love using it (i.e. saying "black bodies" instead of "black people"). Most of the theological struggles that the author describes later stem from this prioritization of the (female) body over the male. One of the reasons she gives for rejecting God is that He is male (and He decided to incarnate in the God-Man Jesus). Interestingly, Burroughs berates the "rigid order of ritual" in traditional Christianity, but she religiously follows her cleaning rituals and her medication rituals. In "Wean and Stop" she realizes her body is dependent upon depression medication to operate somewhat normally; I thought this would help her realize her body's fallability and fickle variability (which would force one to consider such unchanging, objective things as God), but she doesn't go this route.
Contrary to leftist political doctrine, Burroughs makes a couple interesting statements about the group and the individual. At the death of her sister, she seems to have shrunk back into herself, regressing from the community to the individual. Relationships of all types run the risk of loss and the pain that causes. "Better / to have something of her own that can't be ghosted away" she advises, bitterly stating "Groups are an invention / of the womb--to whom do I belong?". This is the nihilistic complaint of those who never wanted to be born but who are here anyway; these same people are often skeptical of childbirth because those children may undergo the same hardships they did. Why not stop the cycle of suffering entirely? That's the question asked by Burroughs and others. If one is alone, sure you have loneliness, but that is often much less painful than the emotions which relationships can cause. Perhaps I'm reading too much into all of this, but I was just surprised by both of those above quotes.
Burroughs seems to have thought deep and long about the relationship of the body to other parts of life, and she has come up with some really creative connections. One such connection was the first "Dear Liver" poem which made a connection between her obsessive cleaning and the cleaning that the liver is supposed to do (but which failed her sister, even after a transplant). Burroughs in essence feels like she's been reduced to a single organ, one which can be fail and be transplanted and be rejected. It's really an amazing metaphor to tie the collection together.
Continuing on, we are met with the aftermath of that death, with the depression and suicidal ideation which sadly I understood quite well. Something I wasn't able to relate to was the author's insistance (after the death) that faith was something mythical because not grounded enough in the body: "I am a / con--cowed by the brute strength / belief takes, sight unseen". In light of the cliche "He'll never give you more than you can bear", Burroughs retorts "There's no good / reason why", but I think this misses the point. I just saw an edifying video yesterday which challenged us to change the question from "Why" to "Who", namely the suffering Christ, who comes to suffer with us. The author seems to think of Christianity in a more gnostic, non-corporeal way, when it really has a lot to say about physical suffering. Probably the pastors she had were incompetent and didn't point that out (instead saying she became an angel, which de-materializes the issue).
Despite this rejection and skepticism on the author's part, the collection ends on an exploratory note. She seeks for artifacts to prove the existence of her sister ("You see she wasn't a dream / although time tries to make her that way.") and to make sense of this tragedy we call life. The last words are haunting and hopeful:
There is worry that proliferates like operatic
throats. Signs happen such that
We are always gasping and awakening
And hopefully this loss that Burroughs felt will awaken something in us, will help comfort us, will even inspire us into kindness and away from religious cliche.
August 10, 2023
For the Sealey Challenge.
tl;dr version: I didn’t hate it, I just couldn’t understand it. The ones I got were great.
Here’s my longer review from insta:
I found this collection *very* challenging. I’m not saying I’m super smart (my dad is sooo much smarter, for example), but as a well-educated and still curious 50-something adult who does almost nothing but read in her free time, there just aren’t that many texts that make me feel downright stupid but this is definitely one of them. There are 14 poems in section one and I only really understood the last 2-3. The third section was similarly perplexing. The (many) God Letter poems in section two are the only ones I can confidently say were comprehensible to me (and they were so comprehensible that I thought maybe I was having a stroke as everything suddenly started to make sense).
.
So many poems with unknown words I didn’t even look up since knowing that one definition still wasn’t going to translate the entire poem for me. I get that her sister died as a kid. I get that she went into a deep depression that lasted years. But…there are certainly entire poems here where I did not grasp much at all.
.
“Yes yes And they’ve left
the curtains chasmal
liking the parabolic backlight
liking being seen.”
.
Whut? They…left the curtains open so people could look in and see them? Is that it? I mean that’s from a poem called “Lovers” but I wasn’t even sure it was about sex, it seemed so clinical.
.
“For any seer, bisection percusses elemental:”
.
Whut? (No idea. Oracles get sensations??) (From a poem called “Supposition.)
.
I might try to read it again tomorrow morning (a lot of the poems are very short), but yeah I’m not smart enough to find a way in to most of these.
.
(Or maybe I’ll just read the six God Letter poems a few more times, enjoy them, and then let this go.)
tl;dr version: I didn’t hate it, I just couldn’t understand it. The ones I got were great.
Here’s my longer review from insta:
I found this collection *very* challenging. I’m not saying I’m super smart (my dad is sooo much smarter, for example), but as a well-educated and still curious 50-something adult who does almost nothing but read in her free time, there just aren’t that many texts that make me feel downright stupid but this is definitely one of them. There are 14 poems in section one and I only really understood the last 2-3. The third section was similarly perplexing. The (many) God Letter poems in section two are the only ones I can confidently say were comprehensible to me (and they were so comprehensible that I thought maybe I was having a stroke as everything suddenly started to make sense).
.
So many poems with unknown words I didn’t even look up since knowing that one definition still wasn’t going to translate the entire poem for me. I get that her sister died as a kid. I get that she went into a deep depression that lasted years. But…there are certainly entire poems here where I did not grasp much at all.
.
“Yes yes And they’ve left
the curtains chasmal
liking the parabolic backlight
liking being seen.”
.
Whut? They…left the curtains open so people could look in and see them? Is that it? I mean that’s from a poem called “Lovers” but I wasn’t even sure it was about sex, it seemed so clinical.
.
“For any seer, bisection percusses elemental:”
.
Whut? (No idea. Oracles get sensations??) (From a poem called “Supposition.)
.
I might try to read it again tomorrow morning (a lot of the poems are very short), but yeah I’m not smart enough to find a way in to most of these.
.
(Or maybe I’ll just read the six God Letter poems a few more times, enjoy them, and then let this go.)
January 11, 2025
A collection of poems about family, grief, mental health, the body, and survival.
from The Lovers: "No one said / it could be like this: // returning your partner's gaze, / learning his whole language, / realizing you, too, can be read."
from Incidents for the Forgettery: "What I mishear is the objective / hue of his voice, its inflection / signifying the wonder he holds for a / woman's functional use. I am welcome / for my utility, how I might serve, my / southern grace having grown me / toward the necessity of a tool."
from God Letter: "Einstein didn't believe / in a persona God, but in 'Spinoza's God who reveals / himself in the orderly harmony / of what exists,' which makes me thing of nature / poetry, how harmony, to borrow / the word, can occur."
from The Lovers: "No one said / it could be like this: // returning your partner's gaze, / learning his whole language, / realizing you, too, can be read."
from Incidents for the Forgettery: "What I mishear is the objective / hue of his voice, its inflection / signifying the wonder he holds for a / woman's functional use. I am welcome / for my utility, how I might serve, my / southern grace having grown me / toward the necessity of a tool."
from God Letter: "Einstein didn't believe / in a persona God, but in 'Spinoza's God who reveals / himself in the orderly harmony / of what exists,' which makes me thing of nature / poetry, how harmony, to borrow / the word, can occur."
December 21, 2024
"Why would you put
so much sadness in one person, do you know
what the dark looks like and that it has its own
gravity"
from "God Letter"
These poems sit at the crossroads between grief and trauma, shaking out offerings at once hard and healing to hold. How we suffer, each and every one of us, Lord - how some of us will die from it, and how others will watch us die, til we wake one day into a never-unsorrowing but bright, ragingly living day. We're alive. That is our penance. That is our unutterable joy.
so much sadness in one person, do you know
what the dark looks like and that it has its own
gravity"
from "God Letter"
These poems sit at the crossroads between grief and trauma, shaking out offerings at once hard and healing to hold. How we suffer, each and every one of us, Lord - how some of us will die from it, and how others will watch us die, til we wake one day into a never-unsorrowing but bright, ragingly living day. We're alive. That is our penance. That is our unutterable joy.
August 2, 2022
Day 1 of the Sealey poetry challenge.
I enjoyed part 2 the most. Was alarmed by the sudden switch from poems discussing the death of her sister to poems discussing porn which distracted me from the actual experience of reading and feeling the words.
I enjoyed part 2 the most. Was alarmed by the sudden switch from poems discussing the death of her sister to poems discussing porn which distracted me from the actual experience of reading and feeling the words.
August 2, 2022
Burroughs really has a talent for evocative imagery and capturing remembered moments. One of the several poems titled “Incidents for the Forgettery” that focused on how a man saw her as a tool particularly stood out for me.
November 20, 2021
3.5-- Part two was the most powerful; her writing on grief and depression is beautiful
December 29, 2021
3 1/2. Excellent in one of its sections, good in one, very mixed in one.
January 1, 2022
Entrancing. I truly enjoyed making my way through this book of deeply personal poetry. This will be one to revisit, for sure.
July 15, 2022
This collection shifted between profound economy of verse, and being so sparse it lost meaning for me.
October 26, 2022
Exquisite poetry
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews