The Kingdom of the Subjunctive
Suzanne Wise
“A sharp debut . . . Here is autobiography with political purpose, poetic experiment with self-knowing deprecation and unabashed gravity.”
—Tikkun
“The first book of the poet Suzanne Wise, The Kingdom of the Subjunctive takes declarative leaps into the imagined; it expertly carves into gleaming surfaces to examine their astonishing interiors, as well as the tools of examination.”
—American Letters and Commentary
"In The Kingdom of the Subjunctive, the cruel weights of history are freshly remembered, while computer-age white noise is subject to an almost lascivious
forgetting. The center will not hold; the apocalypse is, was, and will be. Suzanne Wise’s imagination is assertive and surprising; her sensibility extends from
the deliciously funny to the austerely tragic. . . .These poems of displacement and vicarious existence encompass external mirrors of the self and ruminations
that boil within. This is a poetry of info-shock confessions and blasted narrators in which urban glut and debris are compounded into monuments to
nation-state and private soul, in which female space is both indeterminate and profligate. Suzanne Wise’s work bristles with the struggle to define and
comprehend the absurd component of evil and despair."
—Alice Fulton
"I love Suzanne Wise’s poems because they’re droll and cavalier, magnificent and terrified all at once. With all the invisible poise of Masculinity—which she doesn’t
care to possess—she manages to flip responsibility governing her poems so that what’s secrectly driving them feels like everyone’s problem. And that seems like a
grand success. As if a vast and almost patriotic distress signal were being sent out."
—Eileen Myles
"Brilliant, necessary, deeply felt, cut-to-the-quick, explosive, sassy and real damn good are just a few ways of describing Suzanne Wise's The Kingdom of the Subjunctive. In the words of Wallace Stevens, Wise's poems resist true wisdom almost successfully."
—Lawrence Joseph
about the author
Suzanne Wise received her Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Michigan,
where she won the Hopwood Award for Poetry. Since then her poems have appeared in Volt,
Tikkun, 13th Moon, Denver Quarterly, Santa Monica Review, Boston
Review, Columbia Poetry Review and elsewhere. She won the Bellingham
Review’s 49th Parallel Poetry Award, judged by Heather McHugh, and has twice been
a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. She lives in New
York City.
Author photo by Walter Smith
two poems from the kingdom of the subjunctive
