Poetry. Susan Gevirtz cuts the box away from the camera as she disassembles other structures that keep the world, as we picture it, in place. For Gevirtz, the cultural is personal, and the personal is constructed as the cultural media--films, TV, newstories, book narratives--are shaped. These poems, gathered from pieces of her deconstructions, are held together by puns, homonyms, metaphors, and blank space. The empty expanses convey a sense of the peril of the self released into the unknown. "If BLACK BOX CUTAWAY is 'risky,'" Gary Sullivan writes in Rain Taxi, it is because it "so thoroughly and convincingly makes us cognizant of the filters through which we perceive--not just language, but life itself."

Author City: SAN FRANCISCO, CA USA

Susan Gevirtz's books include AERODROME ORION & STARRY MESSENGER (Kelsey Street Press, 2010), Broadcast (Trafficker Press, 2009), THRALL (Post Apollo, 2007), Omatic & After St. John (dpress, 2006), HOURGLASS TRANSCRIPTS (Burning Deck, 2001), SPELT, collaboration with Myung Mi Kim (a+bend press, 1999), BLACK BOX CUTAWAY (Kelsey Street Press, 1999), Prosthesis : : Caesarea (Potes and Poets, 1994; reissue Little Red Leaves, 2009), Taken Place (Reality Street, 1993), LINEN MINUS (Avenue B, 1992), Domino: point of entry (Leave Books, 1992), Korean and Milkhouse (ABACUS, Potes and Poets, 1991), and the critical study Narrative's Journey: The Fiction and Film Writing of Dorothy Richardson (Peter Lang, 1996). Many essays have appeared in literary magazines and scholarly journals. She was an Assistant Professor for ten years at Sonoma State University and now teaches in the MFA in Poetry Program at Mills College. With Greek poet Siarita Kouka she runs The Paros Symposium, on Paros island, an annual meeting of poets and translators from Greece and the United States.