Joyfully melding knowing humour and torqued-up wordplay, Holbrook’s 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. Holbrook's poems don’t 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.

Susan Holbrook’s poetry books are Ink Earl (Coach House 2021), Throaty Wipes (Coach House 2016), Joy Is So Exhausting (Coach House 2009), and misled (Red Deer 1999). Her most recent publication is Canon (Zed 2022), a chapbook featuring great works of literature translated through a calculator. She has also written a textbook, How to Read (and Write About) Poetry (Broadview Press 2021), and edited Intertidal: Daphne Marlatt--The Collected Earlier Poems (Talonbooks) and The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson: Composition as Conversation (Oxford UP). Her work has been nominated for numerous awards, including the Governor General's Award, the Trillium Book Award, the Trillium Award for Poetry, and the Pat Lowther Award. She teaches Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Windsor. She lives in Leamington, Ontario.

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