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Sugar
Praise for Sugar
"There is a poem about a homophobic uncle: "AIDS is not a plague, but a
blessing." There is a poem about American literature: "Not all the best
writers are white." There is a poem about anger: "Your fist, my nose, blood
on my T-shirt." There is a poem about sex: "His fingers shift in my ass. I'm
white hot." There is a poem about race: "Don't come home with no nigger or
you got no home." There is a poem about love: "Feel my breath hear my
whisper." There is even a poem about wanting to fuck George W. Bush: "He
fell to his knees like a born-again pledge." These are poems infused with
fire and desire: Pousson, Southern and Cajun and queer—an outsider's
outsider—writes with pithy simplicity and searing precision about growing
up fey in an intolerant world, about family tragedy in his childhood home,
about years passed in big-city gay ghettos—and, most passionately, about
coming home to Louisiana, to New Orleans, where "we'll sink with the city."
“A story snakes through this book, the violent story of how things are made—sugar, love, lonely people. Likewise, Martin Pousson’s poems seem burned into being, like the tattoos that mark them, the flour for making roux, the scars of youth. These fire-wrought poems crackle with sex and longing, leaving a taste on the tongue, ash on the heart.”
“Martin Pousson’s careful use of forms—from couplets to triplets to prose poems—tautens his deeply felt meditations on home and family, exclusion and loss, wounding and survival.”
“Here is the poet Louisiana has always wanted. Gulf Coast heat turns into huge trees and lush flora, which then turn into sex and dramatic dialogue. Desire so metamorphic inevitably slides toward hallucination. To convey experience at the edge, Martin Pousson has invented a new poetics that takes from the earlier art only its intense imagery and verbal economy. The few dozen pages of Sugar bring a tragic and sensuous bayou mindscape unforgettably to life.”
“With Sugar, Martin Pousson returns to the
territory that activated his novel, No Place, Louisiana, recharging
that fertile ground with a shift from prose to poetry. The result is
a series of compressed observations, by turns satiric and heartbreaking,
languorous, outraged, and tender.” “The poems in Martin Pousson’s debut volume of verse,
Sugar, are achingly bittersweet, unfolding in touching fits and
starts, and full of startlingly timed shocks. It’s evocative of Elizabeth
Bishop’s Geography III, but with balls and more politically intrepid.”
“Martin Pousson’s dirty south, chock full of fresh wounds and age-old alienation, is a pure pleasure to read again and again. For those willing to ride shotgun, just know that his road is torn to shreds. And his sugar ain’t sweet. It’s scorched.”
“Pousson’s Sugar shoves the edge of the sword
into the bone. With poems like ‘Directions’ and the bare-faced grit
of Louisiana’s ‘Live Oak,’ he delves into the beginnings, the bloodline,
and thrusts us forward into the ferocity of AIDS, the scars it leaves
behind, the memory where ‘I could kiss him anywhere / he said / except
his mouth.’” “In Sugar Pousson has masterfully mined the
infinitely complex overlapping edges of language, perception, desire,
and recollection that comprise what we call experience. These are the
poems of someone who has not just survived, but someone who feels impelled
to thrive.” release: November 2005 |
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