susana gardner

Susana Gardner is the author of the full-length poetry
collections HERSO (Black Radish Books, 2011) and [ LAPSED INSEL WEARY ] (The Tangent Press, 2008). Her third book, CADDISH, was published by Black Radish Books, in 2013. She has published several chapbooks, including Hyper-Phantasie Constructs (Dusie Kollektiv, 2010) and Herso (University of Theory and Memorabilia Press, 2009). Her poetry has appeared in many online and print publications including Jacket, How2, Puerto Del Sol, and Cambridge Literary Review among others. Her work has also been featured in several anthologies, including 131.839 slög með bilum (131,839 keystrokes with spaces) (Ntamo, Finland, 2007) and NOT FOR MOTHERS ONLY: CONTEMPORARY POEMS ON CHILD-GETTING AND CHILD-REARING (Fence Books, United States, 2007). She lives in Zürich, Switzerland, where she also edits and curates the online poetics journal and experimental kollektiv press, Dusie.

Praise for Herso

“I don’t know another poet so formally daring. Rebellious curlicue and lace significant: the pages gleam with pleasure, finesse and audacious measure of human becoming. A consideration of feminine inheritance, rebirth paroled by langue, a her(o)’s journey as decadently articulated as sea-froth. Find it too pretty at your peril—you’ll get pricked by the fine point on this punning”—Catherine Wagner

It’s a pleasure to watch Susana Gardner stretch the language out to its full wingspan, displaying the gendered presumptions that give it flight. Her writing lines up “our turmoils in filched onus rows,” then ships them out via “Rouged Ifs” and charged “stutterance” toward “a restless and scattered hopeful.” Herso is my her( o): froward, many-minded, multi-tongued. —Rodney Koeneke

If Susana Gardner didn’t exist we’d need to invent her Right Now. You’ll want to travel with her, as sometimes you just want to wake up into language in a red-gold way, hearing all the voices, where we’re going. Like a self picked up in echosound, flipping & flick-flacking. HD & Loy & Woolf & Barnes suddenly re-born on a twenty-first-century beach. That continual discovery of what it means to step out in to the day, the gift & adventure of it. Herso rings with rich footsteps, archaic, playful, tongued.—Carol Watts

Today I’ve been reading Susana Gardner’s HERSO: AN HEIRSHIP IN WAVES. It’s pretty wild, like all the other poetry is just contentedly hanging out in yoga pants & old navy polar fleece, and Susana’s shows up with an Elizabethan gown bedazzled with light-emitting “starhewn dreamdust,” its hair a nest for seahorses which have mated with perefrine falcons, & none of it not once apologizing for over-dressing or even acknowledging it knows what sweat pants are. It’s like lace carved from marble, maybe also a lazer disc on which, in very tiny letters, someone has painted with a moustache hair the words INTERLOPING GENERATORS SANS REGISTRIES. And also “thee thee thee thee thee thee . . .”—Anne Boyer

The “new I” is “her” or “her(o),” on “everturning” an emergence of perceptions smacking with each phrase on new angles and interjections. The book moves through sections of wildly differing formal investigations, sometimes narrative, as clear as “Seeing past her own fucking mess in the kitchen,” and sometimes mad explosions of vispo. Each section offers a (re)transformation of self- and outward recognition, while repeatedly starting over and learning the unmade self anew. Each act in this book practices self-destruction at once with creative generation. We have in Gardner a pure identity, a giftedly honest and formally stunning projectionist of consciousness who imposes nothing upon us but the naked breath of language in the act of happening on a sufficient landscape or raw field of white space to glow in. We have a radical experimentalist with purpose and unabashed human desires, above all to speak and to find shape and resonance in perpetual varieties “an infantine picture–made actual in/its clarification of what simply is.”—Matthew Henriksen

The Brewing Luminous with Tom Orange featuring Susana Gardner
Susana reads from HERSO and talks with host Tom Orange about the book and her poetry life.

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