Pioneers in the Study of Motion

Susan Briante

“Amid a riot of signals, cranes, and circuitry—from Mexico City to Antarctica—the reader succumbs to a sense of non-stop construction, to the craven expansion of cities in the glistening fields. In the chaos of sensory overload, the poet still manages to detect ‘droplets of pollen slip from anther to stamen,’ to feel a stream running dry inside. It’s a work of shuddering velocity—an ode, a screed, a lament, a love song of ‘pristine and inarticulate mornings.’ Susan Briante’s Pioneers in the Study of Motion details the ravages of the world in a voracious struggle to savor its sweetness.” —C.D. Wright

“Susan Briante brings vibrancy and precision to her image making with a language that thrives on sensual disclosures of subject matter and shifting after-effects of the unforgotten. Pioneers in the Study of Motion traces the unsettling of a life over geographies of what we leave behind, in forms of address at once alert to the vernacular of lyric thinking and to speculative pleasures that do not shy from accountability, aesthetic and ethical. Her practice compels argument—in great shortage across the alleged fence of U.S. verse writing today—and so makes a claim on a time lag: that of semblance in search of sounds assembled in such ‘slender forms [as] to express a large country.’” —Roberto Tejada

“Susan Briante’s poetry recalls aspects of Cesar Vallejo’s Trilce’s non-sequitur shifts that feel right but elude the univocational mind. Gary Snyder’s noun thing density also comes to mind in her sensuous, crosscut, traveler observations. This writing fractures, caesuras, and rends its way through a Mexican, American, international, indigenous present, achieving a density that, in language, works through our urban sign-loaded multidirectional scapes.”—Clayton Eshleman