Susan M. Schultz
Memory Cards: The Thomas Traherne Series ISBN: 978-1-58498-119-0, paper, $16.95 
"Using Traherne's texts as a new kind of mirror, Schultz shows us the value in the relationships and interactions throughout the world, be it in Hawaii (where she resides) or further out in space (other countries, other continents) and time (other moments, other centuries). Memory Cards, dense and thorough, is also airy, exciting, provacative, and mysterious. The energy and devotion to such a vast expanse of ideas in this book is as adventurous and as it is resolute." --Greg Bem, Rain Taxi |
Susan M. Schultz has lived in and worked in Hawai`i since 1990. She is author of a critical book, A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, and several books of poetry and poetic prose. Most recently, Singing Horse Press published Dementia Blog, Memory Cards: 2010-2011 Series and “She’s Welcome to Her Disease”: Dementia Blog, Vol. 2. Vagabond Press published Memory Cards: Dogen Series in their deciBels Series. Schultz founded Tinfish Press in 1995. Tinfish is now in its twentieth year of publishing experimental poetry from the Pacific. She is a life-long fan of the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team.
“Meditation is a practice of gratitude and examination of conscience, addressing ‘Things strange yet common, incredible yet known,’ in the words of Thomas Traherne. Citations from Traherne propel each of Susan M. Schultz’s prose poems, their punctual wonder and upstanding grief at the unrolling days of six recent months in 2014 to 2015. These works of Schultz’s are ways of living in sentences, living by naming, addressing everyday life by examining what turn out to be the tenets of compassion, caritas and temperate hope. Schultz’s empathetic witnessing via pared-down sentences of reportage offers a measured commentary on our pulse through time. Any given meditation may include the notice of wars, massacres, homelessness, friendship, headlines, daily life with a dying cat, questions of the uses and ethics of writing, family relations, work life, all according to her inclusive intention: ‘To lose focus is to see more.’ This is a humane, admirable and exacting book.” — Rachel Blau DuPlessis “In Memory Cards: Thomas Traherne Series, Susan M. Schultz interlaces memoir and meditation, the personal and the political. In doing so, she creates a poetic space where deities grapple with demons, where the heat of history meets the frigid diction of duplicity, where politics is a ruby-wattled rooster that won’t go away. Leavened with questions that beckon the unknowable, these poems shimmy between Traherne’s higher power and the powerless among us. ‘The problem,’ she writes, ‘is the glass between us.’ This is a poetry that resists simple slotting, where ‘detail is memory’s refuge and its scoundrel,’ and where we are drawn to notice the tiny moments that gift us with relation. Through it all, Schultz shows us that sometimes we make choices, but that our choices make us, too.” — Jules Boykoff “‘What we do in saying,’ Susan Schultz writes, ‘is more than words allow us.’ Thus her Memory Cards: Thomas Traherne Series unfolds as resource that is both deep and expansive. Schultz makes poems that plumb the mundane with patience and honesty: in that way, this is difficult work, but also work that continuously opens recognitions for the reader (‘Difficulty is invitation, after all.’). What emerges is all that poetry can be when attention and intelligence combine toward an ethics of empathy. Schultz listens truly, and such listening creates ‘a politics of person, not idea, of love without absorption, of the simple word.’” —Elizabeth Robinson “As each poem by Susan M. Schultz begins with a line from Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditations, the strengths of her poems honor their source, offering a fresh reason for Traherne’s meditations remaining relevant as centuries unfold. Schultz’s poems are prose poems like Traherne’s paragraphs but are located in her and our (as readers) time. Sadly, this means referencing the homeless, ‘Kabul,’ the Walmart worker’s low wages and even ‘Trump.’ Fortunately, Schultz keeps our attention, even on topics that one might wish to bypass, through resonance (‘Lavafall at Pahoa’s transfer station; someone lays red petals on its black’), imagery (‘loss, like a rope in my stomach, turning to braid’), even whimsy (‘Await the typo for that is where tooth lies’), and finally wisdom (‘The weed whackers insure an absence of quiet. Quiet must be made; it’s not a taking away but an addition to.’) With their layers, often combined in pleasingly unexpected ways, these meditations—and poems—offer an immensely satisfying read.” —Eileen Tabios |