The Kingdom of the Subjunctive

“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