Dogpark Collective, 2019
I
inhaled New Sutras in one sublime
sitting. This sparkling new poetry book
by Suzanne Stein examines, among many other facets of daily existence, what a
line of poetry can do. What it can
contain and how it sustains itself. It explores its possibilities. The line, as
Suzanne Stein suggests, arrives “meaningfully uncomfortable frequently”.
Here,
within this long poem, the line always delivers. The line is prismatic. The line is a sutra, a thread. It is a yoga
posture; it is a fragment lifted from sacred text. The line is a memorable and
funny tweet. It connects an amalgamation of thought and experience. It is the
horizon. It is a door, a dream, a factory, a bubble bath, a reality show, a
cocktail. It is the line that joins the writer and the reader: “do you see what
I mean?”.
New Sutras traces an 8 year
span of time (2008-2016) during which Stein was living in San Francisco and
working at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The time she carved out for writing resulted
in sharp moments that reflect a universal experience of economic crisis,
entropy, exhaustion, anxiety, and social media overload: “If feel 80% more
agony today”. The book is assembled in inverted time. The junctures and pivots are subtle. There is a sense one is looking through a
telescope and a microscope simultaneously.
I
allowed myself the pleasure of being carried by New Sutras, from line to line and page to page, to encounter
moments that meld and gel, but also hold their own as individual proclamations,
questions, illustrations, instructions, histories, pithy witticisms, and
humorous observations, as in this acute remark: “This horoscope is so last
year”.
Stein
examines, with great agility, the
complexities of thought, what thoughts are filtered through and how those
thoughts become a line: “Every day I unbury -- I dig up. I find relics of
myself/in sympathy” Is this the act of writing?
Of living? Of being online? Of
excavating the self through yoga and meditation? In these pages, our palimpsestic selves are
illuminated.
This book calls attention to writing and to
its own poetics: “doesn’t this look like
an images?” “doesn’t this look like a zeroes?” Collaging lines from varying
sources such as James Baldwin, Twitter, Virginia Woolf, and yogic mantras,
lines assemble, transform and transcend.
The line holds up. The line holds
up the reader. The line is both refraction and contraction. The line is both
“distraction and desire”. The line is elastic. Consider the momentum of these
compact and entrancing lines:
time’s a soft science
blade at the beach
diligent rose
indictable mint
New Sutras is a candid,
refreshing take on what it means to be human in this eerily dystopian,
frenetic, and multi-faceted landscape: “I am awkward in my salivating soul”.
This book leaves one to question what a life is, what a line means; and asks
Stein, “It is real?”
Heather Sweeney, she/her, lives in San Diego where she writes,
teaches and does visual art. Her
chapbooks include Just Let Me Have This (Selcouth Station Press) and Same
Bitch, Different Era: The Real Housewives Poems (above/ground press). Her collections, Dear Marshall, Language
is Our Only Wilderness (Spuyten Duyvil Press) and Call Me California
(Finishing Line Press) are forthcoming.