Joy Is So Exhausting

(Paperback)

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Shortlisted for the 2010 Trillium Book Award for Poetry!

Joyfully melding knowing humour and torqued-up wordplay, Holbrooks second collection is a comic fusion of the experimental and the experiential, the procedural and the lyric. Punch lines become sucker punches, line breaks slip into breakdowns, the serious plays comical and the comical turns deadly serious. Holbrooks poems dont use humour as much as they deconstruct the comic impulse, exposing its roots in the political, the psychological and the emotional life of the mind. Many of these poems import shapes and source texts from elsewhere home inspection reports, tampon instructions, poems by Lorca in a series of translations, transpositions and transgressions that invite a more intimate and critical rapport with the written word. This is not merely a book, it is a chocolate-covered artificially intelligent virus with an impish sense of humour that will continue to replicate in your mind long after initial exposure.

Reviews

'Clever and dizzying.' -- Uptown 'With Joy Is So Exhausting, Holbrook gives us humour, bluntness, shrugs of shoulders, and -- yes -- joy ... rife with tongue-in-cheek observation.' -- Northern Poetry Review 'This collection is a cornucopia of poetic delight. Holbrook comes at you from all directions, assaulting you with the slam-bam of lyric, prose, and a well-honed sense of humour.' -- Prairie Fire 'If the old adage is right that honey attracts more than vinegar does, then Susan Holbrook's Joy Is So Exhausting gives potential cynics so much humour that they can laugh themselves back to that moment in high school when they started to hate poetry in the first place.' -- Georgia Straight 'Holbrook is a poet of Rabelaisian intensity who ranges from sprawling prose to word-play couplets. These litanies are political, bawdy, word-drunk, and anything but exhausting.' -- Eye Weekly

Author Bio

Susan Holbrook is a poet and fiction writer whose first book, misled, was shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award and the Stephen J. Stephensson Award. Her chapbook Good Egg Bad Seed was published by Nomados in 2004. She teaches North American literatures and creative writing at the University of Windsor. She recently co-edited The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson: Composition as Conversation (forthcoming from Oxford University Press, 2009).