Description
Poetry. "In poems that manage to be both pity-less and mercy-full, Susanne Dyckman's A DARK ORDINARY takes us deep inside the lives of Lewis Hine's early 20th century photographic subjects: child laborers, low-wage workers, and newly arrived immigrants on Ellis Island. Dyckman gestures toward the indignities, disappointments, and even horrors that mark their lives while she simultaneously lays bare their shining, irrepressible human light. These poems are sparse and beautifully composed missives to us, her readers, on the lasting and expansive nature of humankind. As Dyckman writes: 'We are / finite and frightening / or an infinite always / from somewhere else.'"—Laura Sims
"A DARK ORDINARY is concerned with a double struggle, that of imagining the words of the early twentieth century immigrants denied civil voices, through the always-mute barriers of the photographic record. 'She calls, no one hears, her words are thin.' Dyckman's poems are courageous attempts to puncture this hard double membrane. How do you tend (attend) the voices that have been lost to history? With emphatic membership, through words felt to be coming from stares: 'She knows her voice will change.'"—George Albon
"Susanne Dyckman studies history, language, and image with exceptional insight and sensitivity. As a result, our resource for a politicized poetry grows significantly with A DARK ORDINARY. Here, her perceptions help the reader recognize that to be a citizen in the fullest sense is to partake in as much of the lyricism of hope as in the daily trudge of necessity. These quietly insistent poems cradle the ambiguities of our human condition; they illuminate the overlap of the stoic and the plaintive:
She will pull away from the familiar and stand, born new, on her own. A part, apart, aperture. Too many definitions. What she knew is no longer but clings.
It is empathy rather than indignation that animates A DARK ORDINARY. And this determined and profound attentiveness becomes a form of justice, a transient 'drape of shelter' even as 'a scatter of debris trails our patterns.'"—Elizabeth Robinson
Author Bio
Susanne Dyckman is the author of EQUILIBRIUM'S FORM (Shearsman Books) and three chapbooks. She lives and writes in Albany, California, and has taught creative writing at the University of San Francisco and San Francisco State University. She is also a co-editor of Instance Press.
Author City: Albany, CA USA