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Box
"Let’s just get this part out of the way, Sue Burton’s Box is a brilliant, imperative, masterful collection. I envy this book; I covet and adore it. It is a book of the body and the soul, of the body as a trap for the soul, and the box—from the magician’s box, where the body is sawn in half, to the coffin—as a trap for the (female) body. It is a book of mirth and snark—and deadly serious intent.
If the box is its defining metaphor, and the sawed-in-half-woman its central archetype, then its thematic axis is abortion, legal, illegal, botched, and died-for. Burton’s source material is the dovetailing of the holy quartet: public history, political history, family history, and apparently personal history. But this is poetry, not polemic. Its bottom line is the possibility of language within and beyond the borders of its ideas.
Along with being badass and defiant and imaginative as hell, the book is formally-astute and deeply literary. There is a villanelle. There are sonnets, including a prose sonnet sequence in which each poem is shaped like—you guessed it—a box. And there is Hopkins, Dickinson, Marianne Moore, and Adrienne Rich canoodling in the same collection with a girl named Ruby, a sprite, 'dressed like a man dressed like a goat…down there in the dark like Nijinsky’s faun, in a cream-colored body suit, little goat horns that nobody could see, bobby-pinned in hair that nobody could see, red-streaked and kinked.'
It’s all here—story, song, and figuration, insurgence, sorrow, and love. 'Once a woman sawn in half, always./Though it’s all in the eye—yours—the beholder,' she writes. I beheld. I urge you, too, to behold."
--Diane Seuss (Contest Judge)
If the box is its defining metaphor, and the sawed-in-half-woman its central archetype, then its thematic axis is abortion, legal, illegal, botched, and died-for. Burton’s source material is the dovetailing of the holy quartet: public history, political history, family history, and apparently personal history. But this is poetry, not polemic. Its bottom line is the possibility of language within and beyond the borders of its ideas.
Along with being badass and defiant and imaginative as hell, the book is formally-astute and deeply literary. There is a villanelle. There are sonnets, including a prose sonnet sequence in which each poem is shaped like—you guessed it—a box. And there is Hopkins, Dickinson, Marianne Moore, and Adrienne Rich canoodling in the same collection with a girl named Ruby, a sprite, 'dressed like a man dressed like a goat…down there in the dark like Nijinsky’s faun, in a cream-colored body suit, little goat horns that nobody could see, bobby-pinned in hair that nobody could see, red-streaked and kinked.'
It’s all here—story, song, and figuration, insurgence, sorrow, and love. 'Once a woman sawn in half, always./Though it’s all in the eye—yours—the beholder,' she writes. I beheld. I urge you, too, to behold."
--Diane Seuss (Contest Judge)
- GenresPoetry
67 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2018
About the author
Sue D. Burton
2 booksSue D. Burton is a physician assistant specializing in women’s health care. Her poetry has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Blackbird, Green Mountains Review, Mudlark, New Ohio Review, Shenandoah, and on Verse Daily. She has been awarded Fourth Genre’s 2017 Steinberg Essay Prize, a Vermont Arts Council grant, and nominations for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net. She holds degrees in writing from Johns Hopkins University and the Vermont College and was apprenticeship-trained as a physician assistant at the Vermont Women’s Health Center.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 23, 2018
There are two themes running through this collection: abortion and the woman the magician saws in half. (Now that I've put that down in writing, I see the connection!) My favorite part of this collection is section III, "Box Set," a cycle of prose poems about Antoinette (Nettie) Bope, who died of a botched abortion in 1902. The writing in this section is more straightforward than the other poems, which are often quite oblique. This is a thought-provoking collection, and Burton uses metaphor and imagery very well.
August 22, 2020
What an intriguing book of poetry! I dogeared many pages. Burton's use of repetition in poems like "RINGLING BROS: MOTHER & DAUGHTER, FUNERAL PROCESSION and Bulletproof is haunting and perfect. I can't wait to read her forthcoming book titled Little Steel.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews