Utopia Minus

Susan Briante

From the Confederacy to Ground Zero to the ruins of urban sprawl, this book is a monument to collapse—itself a terrible art: “Gen. Sherman painted landscapes.” Sometimes, in the breakage of the human, nature returns: a loving catalog of trees and birds as well as shuttered franchise restaurants. Sometimes, when human relations break down, they create terrible yearning. Each type of war, in public space and private interaction, is given a new, evidentiary lament: “O Sunglass Hut, we hardly knew you!”

“What a wildly intelligent, learned poet Briante is, in this biography-autobiography of the American body and soul around 2010, witnessed (and lived) with such bite, understanding, and sorrow. Even as she calls us to watch with her over maybe ‘the end of another creature,’ something here is not-loneliness, for a little while, anyhow, for as long as she is looking at it: ‘How does a tree move when it is angry?/ I want to be angry like that.’” —Jean Valentine

“Utopia Minus is located in a recognizably American city (stripmall, Starbucks, chainlink) at a recognizable moment (the year of the Dixie cup, the year of the orange construction cone), yet it also contains the energy of all that has made that city—every brick, every leaf, every utterance, every poem. Susan Briante is a poet of fierce intelligence and passion, and these poems pulse with playfulness and moral outrage.” —Nick Flynn

“Kafka’s bureaucratic ephemera and Smithson’s grand earthworks morph in Susan Briante’s hands into these dance-like poems, complex and elegant architectures of gesture, a New Babylon of corridors between Texan birches and the strains of Lou Reed’s guitar. Briante is a detritus artist, a gleaner working in the banal of the contemporary world, molding the pieces she finds into vivid mosaics. In Utopia Minus Briante claims her lineage, mapped through dried out gutters in which real human bodies, somewhat uncomfortable but very much alive, float upon a raft made of reassembled bits of downcycled American cities, east mating with west, big colliding with small.” —Rachel Levitsky