Rover Arts digs Joy Is So Exhausting

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 ...

... The purpose of a joke can sometimes be to create social affinity — to put a stranger at ease or invite an outsider in. This is often the function of Holbrook’s humour: to establish rapport with the reader and make fragmented language less opaque. In poems created from a Sudoku puzzle or a creative transliteration of Garcia Lorca, the lyric epiphany favoured in more mainstream poetry is supplanted by formal and syntactical shocks. Although the poet asserts that either 'you like an epiphany or you like a surprise,' her surprises are in a sense epiphanic. A good joke contains a flash of insight so sudden and unpredictable, we can’t help but respond, usually with laughter. While this species of epiphany may not be as cloying as its lyric counterpart, it is familiar enough to make Holbrook’s experimental jolts more palatable. Humour invites us into these poems and makes us want to stay even when we’re startled, a poetic strategy that makes Holbrook’s work especially innovative.

(Read the whole review at www.roverarts.com)