The Paris Poems by Suzanne Burns

Reading Suzanne Burns’s Paris Poems is a joy no matter what city you live in. Though set in the City of Love these are not only love poems, nor are they a kind of travelogue. Burns’s poems, in rich conversational lines, light up the mind’s sky like The Eiffel Tower on New Year’s. These poems are human, fun, and smart. Each page is a passport to a kind of energetic poetry rarely found traveling out of the MFA empires.

—Matthew Dickman, author of All-American Poem (American Poetry Review)

In The Paris Poems Suzanne Burns takes us not only to the Paris of the present and the past, of myth and dream, but also, through her American-abroad narrator, to an America we can only wish we did not have to believe.  Ms. Burns’s voice and poetic lines are personal, fresh, startling, and touched at times by genius.  Here “fallen leaves / heckle the ground” and “something is unsavory in desire.”  No one today is writing livelier or more perceptive poetry. 
           
—Tom Whalen, author of Dolls: Prose Poems (Caketrain Press)

this is subject matter clichéd a century ago; all of it forced into newness, not by the references of modernity, but by the observance of  a well-referenced poetess of now—
a potential beginning for this century’s cliché.
           
—c.vance, author of we (Jaded Ibis Press)

Suzanne Burns takes us on a tour of the city of romantic myth, a poetic anthropology where the real has been fragmented through plastic souvenirs, postcards of paintings, guidebook histories, French cookery shows on American TV, dead celebrities, and the Paris of Michael Jackson’s daughter and the idiot hotel heiress. Burns unearths the beauty in all of it, but finds the essence of the city in the small things, the overlooked and forgotten, in the way words sound. The Paris Poems are a tender series of linked poems that remind us, that ultimately, we are all just tourists, and there is no place more illusionary than the place we call home.

—Nathan Penlington, performance poet and author of the one man show Uri & Me

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Suzanne Burns is the author of two previous poetry collections, one which canonized sideshow freaks. In 2009, Dzanc Books debuted her short story collection, Misfits and Other Heroes, and the world slowly fell in love with Tiny Ron, the world’s smallest man. She is currently working on fiction and attempting, for what feels an eternity, to bake the perfect French macron.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 84 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-046-0

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