Susan Holbrook is funny, sometimes enough to make one laugh out loud. In Joy Is So Exhausting, her second collection, she employs a variety of poetic constraints to create poems that surprise and delight without being too cute or comfortable. Constraint-based poems often read as though they must have been much more fun for the writer than they are for the reader, but Holbrook’s sense of humour and preoccupation with the element of surprise help to make her procedural poems seductive ...
