Pioneers in the Study of Motion

Susan Briante

Reviews of the book

“Susan Briante’s full-length debut, Pioneers in the Study of Motion, is a lyric concerned with ethnographic importance, a work of architectural rigor that embraces the fluidity of culture while presenting a timely critique of globalization . . . . Her ambitious poems succeed in taking the reader through a vast highway of nativities, personas, and heritages. Land, language, and character become one in these poems and Briante writes in both first person and third person, mediating between observation and embodiment, between archaic and real . . . . Pioneers in the Study of Motion is an active book, full of poems that spark thought, inspire research, and leave the reader craving more.” —Erica Kaufman, from her review in The Poetry Project Newsletter.

“Briante can’t escape the things of this world and doesn’t want to; instead, these poems take stock, reveal, revel at times, and insist that the borders we keep around our thinking, our lives, and our spaces, insist that those borders are permeable: ‘There is Tupperware buried under that building. Tupperware and tuna fish cans and bulk mailings and dental floss and unmatched socks and dice and sppons and cuff links and office supply catalogues and bolts and coke bottles and combs under that building. / In the Holland Tunnel, tiles glisten white as alveoli. / The glass is wired’ . . . . The visions Pioneers in the Study of Motion offers are not like those of the Oracle of Delphi; they are visions that reveal the sweat, oil, guns, and work behind the next bag of grapes we toss in our shopping carts.” —Ken Rumble, from The Desert City Poetry Series blog.

“Susan Briante’s book, Pioneers in the Study of Motion, is new from Ahsahta Press at Boise State University. ‘It’s a work of shuddering velocity,’ writes C.D. Wright on the back cover, ‘an ode, a screed, a lament, a love song . . . .’ The velocity is that of an acute, lyrical intelligence darting from thing to thing, opening the poetic voice to a broad range of perceptions. I’m especially taken with an intermittent series in the first section of the book, ‘3rd Day of the Rainy Season,’ ‘5th Day of the Rainy Season,’ etc., which read as both an ongoing, submerged ‘ars poetica’/dialogue with the act of writing, a la Robert Duncan’s interwoven ‘Structure of Rime’ series, and a test of the ‘velocity’ that Wright mentions . . . .” —from the review by David Hadbawnik at Primitive Information

“The argument in Briante’s poems claim that this clusterfuck of imagery, violent as it is, composes a totality. The energized form of her poems shows how the fields persist within the paved landscapes. The poetic argument is that things don’t go away—that prior forms do not erase easily. Such knowledge of what lies below haunts present structures. A complex tension becomes apparent in Briante’s claims for cultural and urban spaces, and the tension is left largely unresolved, as it should be. Resolutions to the contradictory demands of commerce on the past might lead some to guilty quips about our implication in a mess inherited from shitty urban planners. Other attempts at resolve might construct a barking voice to move us into action—to somehow do the impossible by turning back time to a period in which America was a nation of yokels, plugged into the land. Briante’s more at ease with herself and with the contradictions of the present. Her work here simply asks for reflection on the belief and desire that motivate these circumstances of change. As ‘pioneers’ we, her audience, must remain open to experience and to the perceptive force of attention. Where such attention is placed—and how it orients us to things—remains our greatest hope for understanding the forms we inhabit.” —from the review by Dale Smith at Bookslut