Description
Book SynopsisNew Theatre represents a lively foray into spaces geographical and utopian that investigate the process of meaning. Coolly cerebral poems about Vladimir Ilyich Lenin's later life muse on power and identity, while an intimate autobiographical long poem counterpoints several quieter, equally surprising pieces that spike and bloom. Autumn. The sky streaked with silk parachutes or by tears. A sparkling epidemic. I think if the world truly tore in half it would seep blue. Susan Steudel is the recipient of several awards for her poetry, including a Vancouver Mayor's Arts Award for emerging artist. New Theatre is her first book.
Trade Review"Shouldn't the two long poems that prop up Steudel's New Theatre react violently with each other? Wouldn't a cancelling occur between the massive historical hinge-event set next to 'properly' subjective modes and shards of beauty? Instead, they seem to exchange structural properties, or stand as figure for each other. A reverberating disturbance occurs offstage, within earshot, and we're left holding her splintered locutions, her chiasmic constructions: 'I am the machining.' It's like a feedback loop we might be the cause of." -- Ken Babstock "Birch, pine, kartofel. The man sits up in his grave, a hair pointing up on his head, not yet bald. In this there is neither bravado nor pathos. Steudel sticks to words, words stick to us, to her, to family, to Lenin, to Kandinsky. Gumilev whispers acrostic antirevolution from the Kovalevsky Forest. A shovel of earth! Assassins! In these quiet intent poems, Steudel shows us deftly that even the adepts of big theatres ache more fiercely in little theatres, made new. As she says herself: '-capture -bound -birth.' And I say: Steudel's New Theatre is a stunning and accomplished debut." -- Elisa Sampedrin
