Joy Is So Exhausting

by Susan Holbrook

Shortlisted for the 2010 Trillium Book Award for Poetry!

Joyfully melding knowing humour and torqued-up wordplay, Holbrook’s second collection is a comic fusion of the experimental and the experiential, the procedural and the lyric. Punch lines become sucker punches, line breaks slip into breakdowns, the serious plays comical and the comical turns deadly serious. Holbrook’s poems don’t use humour as much as they deconstruct the comic impulse, exposing its roots in the political, the psychological and the emotional life of the mind. Many of these poems import shapes and source texts from elsewhere – home inspection reports, tampon instructions, poems by Lorca – in a series of translations, transpositions and transgressions that invite a more intimate and critical rapport with the written word. This is not merely a book, it is a chocolate-covered artificially intelligent virus with an impish sense of humour that will continue to replicate in your mind long after initial exposure.

  

Genres: Poetry, Canada

88 pages, Paperback

First published September 14, 2005

About the author

Born in 1967, Susan Holbrook is a Canadian poet and professor. Holbrook received her B.A.from the University of Victoria, and her M.A.from the University of Calgary. She teaches North American literatures and Creative Writing at the University of Windsor, in Ontario.

Susan Holbrook’s teaching, research and writing is propelled by her interests in contemporary poetry and poetics, Canadian literature, American Modernism, gender studies, and creative writing. She is poetry editor for Coach House press. She is currently working on a poetry manuscript (Throaty Wipes, forthcoming in 2016), and an edition of Daphne Marlatt’s collected poetry.

Reviews

[Jill Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book of poetry so much; and not just because I studied with Susan. It is clever, and funny, and real. "Good Egg Bad Seed" is brilliant, and I laughed out loud while reading it. "Nursery" is everything a woman experiences while breastfeeding in the middle of the night. I think the reason this book is appealing because it is so relatable for women: we've all used a tampon, many of us have fed a baby in the middle of the night (or will), we've been to a conference, we've noticed that there are no greens in our bag of candy.

This is a fun book.

[Alexis]

Met the author at a reading we both gave and she was extremely lovely. Her poetry has a lot of wordplay, humour and wit. This is the kind of poetry that I can't really write, but I definitely appreciate the work of others. Lots of humour here.

[Nikki · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joy Is So Exhausting is anything but exhausting. Rather, it is playful, sensuous, quirky, poignant, inspiring and invigorating. Holbrook shows us the sound/meaning possibilities of language in a way that is funny but never silly. I wonder why more poets don’t use words the way she does?

[Laura · Rating 2 out of 5]

I likes how she writes in such everyday life - but I found I couldnt feel connected to it.

[Gerry LaFemina · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am not, in general, a fan of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry and its offshoots, so perhaps I'm not the guy who should have been reading this book, but it was in the to-read stack. Holbrook is clever with language--she's looking for sound play, mad-libbing in surprising words into phrases we know so hat we reexperience them in fresh ways. Fresh, unfortunately, doesn't always mean they engaged me. And the poems that are "sodukos" in which the words on each line are repeated in different order left me blank. Still, there are a number of poems that are funny, engaging, and interesting--these tended to be the least "experimental" and therefore the poems that invited me in the most.

[Diwali L · Rating 3 out of 5]

Somehow, I didn't know this was a book of poems. Some of them I didn't quite get, but most were hilarious and/or very deep.