Sucks To Be You, and other true taunts - Suzannah Showler

Today's book of poetry:  Sucks To Be You, and other true taunts.  Suzannah Showler.  Odourless Press. Toronto, Ontario.  2013.

Whoever said that good things come in small packages had it exactly right if they were thinking of this excellent little chapbook, Sucks To Be You, and other true taunts, by Suzannah Showler.  This gem is from the new small press Odourless Press and the careful editing hand of Bardia Sinaee.

Sucks To Be You, and other true taunts has such wonderfully titled poems as I know you are, but what am I?, why don't you go home and cry about it?, do you have a staring problem?, stop hitting yourself, and the soon to be famous takes one to know one.  The glib titles have the proper ring to them and these short poems are snap your fingers tight.

takes one to know one

just because you can't see the fingerling
moulds packed up my nostrils like espresso
grinds, or feel the dirt's mineral sweat haloed
around me like the cellular-thin buffer between
a vacuum seal and its charge, doesn't mean
I'm not dead.  If you've failed to bury me, and
the ants single-filing through my ear canal are,
as you say, all in the mind, that's a testament
only to your clumsiness with ceremony and
gardening tools.  Am I cramping your style?
Paper looks so floppily harmless until you
turn it sideways.  You've used this against me.
Let this be a reminder that the dead bleed, too,
and at greater personal expense.  I don't know
why you're kicking up this fuss.  I've only ever
haunted you in a quiet, mossy sort of way.

...

Suzannah Showler edits poetry for Dragnet Magazine and won the 2012 Matrix LitPop Award for Poetry.

The design of this Odourless Press book is almost as stylish as the poems themselves.   This all too brief collection (my only complaint) is witty and quicksilver true.  Short and sweet.  The bee's knees.





www.odourless.ca