Polaroids of Turbulence by Henry Sussman

What links the “Polaroids of Turbulence” in this debut volume is the ominous uncertainty that has become an increasingly prominent feature on our shared cultural landscape. This abrupt dismissal of assumptions that were once safe bets regarding the environment, the U.S. government, the media, and some of the world’s beloved sites and cities is a thread and climate pursuing these poems wherever they happen to wander. And wander they do: over an expansive map including Harrisburg, PA, Berlin, Krakow, Cluj, Phnom Penh, and South Australia among its points. Undergirding these texts is the conviction that the shifting political landscape is not only a worthy but compelling occasion for the poetic transcript. The chronology of the events referenced extends from Central High School, Philadelphia, in the early 1960’s and the Cambodian genocide of a decade later, through 9/11 and on to the U.S. presidential election of 2016. Whichever outgrowths of contemporary culture the poems address (TV miniseries, aimless recreational travel, runaway capitalism), the “Polaroids,” as filmstrips of language, are propelled by a common irresistible blast of chaos into their consolidation, digression, and wandering–from one articulation to the next.

Polaroids of Turbulence is a chronicle of culture trouble, a verse report of the unfathomable depths of our times: “barbarism’s eternal return.” Sussman’s sharp observations and linguistic play mark a “jagged trajectory” through “the outerbanks of / introspection.”

—Nancy Kuhl

“Snap, snap…” With each click, the polaroid captures a global landscape of the “kaleidoscopic jerking of the real.” From Germantown to Washington Sq., Venice to Paris, Krakow to Basel, and Cluj to hometowns never inhabited, its O’Haraian urban surrealist surface is overcast with a Historicist vision, fusing past with present, history with culture, sarcasm with introspection, and anger with humor. To open Henry Sussman’s Polaroids of Turbulence is to open to a “manifold of seeing,” to face the “incursion of the real” head on, and to plunge into the turbulent vertigo of a Möbius strip of the real, relentlessly twisting, unedited and unexpurgated.

—Ming-Qian Ma

These Polaroids—brilliant, old fashioned, postmodern—instantly engage attention: passionate, bold, none too polite. Extravagant in topical detail and language. Playful. Sussman’s travels lead him to a deeply personal a culturally meaningful past, startling possibilities of the future, but most truly through the present—today’s world of planet warming and anguish, garbage and wonder. Pennsylvania, Krakow, Sydney are some of the many places “snapped” on the course of his journey, but finding the coordinates of “Where I am” and where you are is not so simple. Sussman has outdone himself here.

—Linda Reinfeld

Boasting a superb title that it delivers on, Polaroids of Turbulence is an ambitious and exclamatory exploration of pain, politics, and a speaker haunted by discombobulation. Sussman crafts a raft for that journey from repurposed dialects, some classical or commercial, some irreverent. This is a book for firebrands of the highest order, those who would edit, shed, expunge former disguises!

—Kyle McCord, Author of Reunion of the Good Weather Suicide Cult

Walt Whitman may have uttered his barbaric yawp, but throughout Henry Sussman’s stunning debut collection, Polaroids of Turblence, “The wailing of the sirens will not stop.” In poem after uncompromising poem Sussman hurtles the reader forward, as if to build up to an escape velocity, so that we might break free of noise and dissonance and dissociation in order to discover at last an undeniable, human space of the Real. Is Polaroids of Turblence exciting or exacting? Read it and find out how it can be both.

—Richard Deming, author of This Exquisite Lonelines

“Imagine an aperture open not only to light, but to the mind of light–to image and to the time passing through an image, with all the content and conflagrations of time on view. Such an aperture is the eye of Henry Sussman’s poetry, and the light it finds is the light of our complex, colloquial day. The poems in Polaroids of Turbulence are vivid companions to that day, including most especially “Three Deer in a Development near Harrisburg PA”, a poem which offers visionary companionship equal to that of Ammons’ “Easter Morning”. Sussman’s is a dearly welcome collection.”

—Donald Revell

Hardly a quick and grainy snapshot, Polaroids is a hologram built from Sussman’s keen-eyed and deeply considered experience of our recent and excruciating century. Ranging widely across histories, languages, forms, and geography, his intricate sonics and erudite critical eye distill his physical and intellectual journeys into this map of a khōra, a space or interval for being, a “topography of outback” with “unremitting luminosity by far its prominent feature.”

—Elizabeth T Gray Jr

“I am poetry, / not that you’d guess,” writes Henry Sussman. How right, and at the same time how wrong, can a man be, for even the slightest glance at this collection reveals the poetry to be of the highest originality, out-Ginsberging Ginsberg in energy, but sounding like no one else. Nothing frightens Henry Sussman. There is swerve, boldness with language and typography, but, above all, there is truth and mastery in the many moods and subjects. It is a poetry of illumination which somehow illuminates itself even more in its progress. I cannot imagine a finer debut volume of poems than this.

—Roger Craik

Henry Sussman is a critic and writer currently living in New York City. Trained in nineteenth and twentieth-century Euro-American Literatures and Critical Theory, he has practiced poetry for decades as an alternative text-medium to fiction and discursive prose. Literacy, the interplay of media, and the theory and architecture of prevailing cultural systems have, over recent decades, been his driving interests. Drawing their impetus from French theory and twentieth-century philosophy, the Frankfurt School, and psychoanalysis, his writings about literature largely concentrated on Euro-American modernism and its austere aftermath. Ongoing research created occasions for extended travel. His most recent work of cultural criticism is The Great Dismissal: Memoir of the Cultural Demolition Derby, 2015-22 (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023). October, 2023 saw the premier of his play, “Soirée at Walter Benjamin’s,” in the Winterfest season of the New York Theater Festival. Polaroids of Turbulence is a debut volume of poetry.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 92 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-458-1

$22

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