Susan Wheeler, whose last individual collection predicted the spiritual losses of the economic collapse, turns her attention to the most intimate of subjects: the absence or loss of love.
A meme, a word that debuted in reference to genetic replication, is a unit of thought replicated by imitation; examples of memes, Richard Dawkins wrote, “are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches.” Occupy Wall Street is a meme, as are internet ideas and images that go viral. What could be more potent memes than those passed down by parents to their children?
Wheeler reconstructs her mother’s voice—down to its cynicism and its mid twentieth-century midwestern vernacular—in “The Maud Poems,” a voice that takes a more aggressive, vituperative turn in “The Devil—or—The Introjects.” In the book’s third long sequence, a generational inheritance feeds cultural transmission in “The Split.” A set of variations on losses and break-ups—wildly, darkly funny throughout and, in places, devastatingly sad—“The Split” brings Wheeler’s lauded inventiveness, wit, and insight to the profound loss of love. One read, and the meme “Should I stay or should I go?” will be altered in your head forever.
Assorted Poems is a generous selection from the first four books by one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary poetry. In Bag o’ Diamonds (1993), Smokes (1998), Source Codes (2001), and Ledger (2005), Susan Wheeler has established herself as a poet of rare gifts. Her work is allusive and searching, sweeping over time and place, from the art of the northern Renaissance to corporate logos, observing and exploring everything with characteristic precision and intelligence. The poems are both rigorous and free, taking on our culture, its beauties and cruelties, its relationship to the past and its uncertain future. Assorted Poems is a vibrantly thoughtful and entertaining book, a mustread from a poet whom Harold Bloom has called “an exuberant, subtle, endlessly inventive original.”
"In hazed heat, mid-September, walking north from Chicago’s Loop, telling myself I was exploring the new life, I dogged as much for tonic, gin. A sign swung beside a basement door, in, out, mirage: RECORD PALACE: J ZZ. Inside I found Acie."
Cindy, a lean, lonely white girl, has come to Chicago to study art history—to be anywhere but where she came from—tract housing in Thousand Oaks, California, mock-stucco buildings, “a tetherball hole in the ten-foot driveway…incessant sun and incessant sunniness of every blonde girl.”
The Record Palace, littered with cans of malt liquor and remnants of past meals, also has boxes upon boxes of records—all jazz. And it has Acie, “big on all sides, top included. A hairnet, the hair below the net long and limp with oil. Green stretch pants, flip-flops, a think black U-tank taut across Sumo folds. Maybe a hundred bins were blocked by the wall of him.” Cindy knows she doesn’t belong, and this is why she stays.
Cindy’s determination leads to a tentative friendship with Acie and she becomes a familiar, if not fully understood, presence in the store. But it is through her chance meeting with Acie’s “offspring” that she becomes embroiled in an unusual crime.
With prose that resembles the syncopated rhythms of jazz, Wheeler offers a stunning portrait of a women searching for an identity in a city on the cusp of social and political change.
"An exquisitely crafted recollection of music, at a pivotal time for both jazz and Chicago." - Steve Martin
"Dialogic, atmospheric, a situation plumbed rather than a plot unfolded - a Chicago noir this is and it casts its spell. - E.L. Doctorow
The many meanings of "economy" are the ground for the mediation and lament of Ledger, Susan Wheeler's fourth book. In its Greek origins, economy referred to the stewardship of a household and, as it developed, the word also came to include aspects of government and of religious faith. Ledger places an individual's crisis of spirituality and personal stewardship, or management of her resources, against a backdrop of a culture that has focused its "economy" on financial gain and has misspent its own tangible and intangible resources.
"Susan Wheeler is an exuberant, subtle, endlessly inventive original, and Ledger marks a wonderful advance in her already vital contribution to American poetry. Best of all in Ledger's varied pleasures is 'The Debtor in the Convex Mirror,' an intricate splendor and triumphant fusion of technique and vision." - Harold Bloom
"If Baudelaire was, for Walter Benjamin, the lyric poet of the era of high capitalism, Susan Wheeler is a lyric poet for an era of superstores, global corporations, and product tie-ins. A ledger is a measure of accounts, and Wheelerís Ledger assesses the place of value in a market-driven world where indebtedness has replaced belief and logos have replaced Logos. Her poems draw on a wealth of sources--from 17th century religious poetry and Flemish painting to contemporary consumerism--in an effort to define our tenancy to rich lords and concurrent losses to the human heart." - Michael Davidson
A book of numbered, untitled poems and collages, each linked to the next by an element in its image or first or last lines. A "key" in the table of contents provides the source-reference for every one, and three appendices - two of handwritten drafts and one of computer source code - round out the collection.
Wheeler's pantheon of effects takes in everything from jingles, tight syllabic stanzas, the odd mix of stentorian modes and cartoonlike plasticity from middle-period Ashbery, pseudo-didactic literariness, myths, fables, surrealist mantras and Swiftian turns. Formally dazzling and spiritually unforgiving, this is an important, limit-testing book.