Pioneers in the Study of Motion (Ahsahta Press: the New Series) - Tapa blanda

Susan Briantes poetry recalls aspects of Cesar Vallejos Trilces non-sequitor shifts that feel right but elude the univocational mind. Gary Snyders noun thing density also comes to mind in her sensuous, crosscut, traveler observations. This writing fractures, caesuras, and rends its way through a Mexican, American, international, indigenous present, achieving a density that, in language, works through our urban sign-loaded multidirectional scapes. Clayton Eshelman

Amid a riot of signals, cranes, and circuitryfrom Mexico City to Antarcticathe reader succumbs to a sense of non-stop construction, to the craven expansion of cities in the glistening fields. In the chaos of sensory overload, the poet still manages to detect droplets of pollen slip from anther to stamen, to feel a stream running dry inside. Its a work of shuddering velocityan ode, a screed, a lament, a love song of pristine and inarticulate mornings. Susan Briantes Pioneers in the Study of Motion details the ravages of the world in a voracious struggle to savor its sweetness. C.D. Wright
Susan Briante brings vibrancy and precision to her image making with a language that thrives on sensual disclosures of subject matter and shifting after-effects of the unforgotten. "Pioneers in the Study of Motion" traces the unsettling of a life over geographies of what we leave behind, in forms of address at once alert to the vernacular of lyric thinking and to speculative pleasures that do not shy from accountability, aesthetic and ethical. Her practice compels argumentin great shortage across the alleged fence of U.S. verse writing todayand so makes a claim on a time lag: that of semblance in search of sounds assembled in such slender forms [as] to express a large country. Roberto Tejada

Susan Briantes book, Pioneers in the Study of Motion, is new from Ahsahta Press at Boise State University. Its a work of shuddering velocity, writes C.D. Wright on the back cover, an ode, a screed, a lament, a love song . . . . The velocity is that of an acute, lyrical intelligence darting from thing to thing, opening the poetic voice to a broad range of perceptions. Im especially taken with an intermittent series in the first section of the book, 3rd Day of the Rainy Season, 5th Day of the Rainy Season, etc., which read as both an ongoing, submerged ars poetica/dialogue with the act of writing, a la Robert Duncans interwoven Structure of Rime series, and a test of the velocity that Wright mentions . . . . from the review by David Hadbawnik at Primitive Information

Poetry. Like lyric field notes from a worldwide anthropological journey, Briante's poems scrutinize human and urban situations. "Amid a riot of signals, cranes, and circuitry--from Mexico City to Antarctica--the reader succumbs to a sense of non-stop construction, to the craven expansion of cities in the glistening fields. In the chaos of sensory overload, the poet still manages to detect 'droplets of pollen slip from anther to stamen,' to feel a stream running dry inside. It's a work of shuddering velocity--an ode, a screed, a lament, a love song of 'pristine and inarticulate mornings.' Susan Briante's PIONEERS IN THE STUDY OF MOTION details the ravages of the world in a voracious struggle to savor its sweetness"--C.D. Wright.