From Publishers Weekly
Often a dance of malapropism, jarring surrealist and pop imagery, violent pastiche and merciless non sequiturs, Wheeler's second book falls somewhere between John Ashbery and Charles Bernstein in its high-end schtick appropriation and baroque, metaphysical strains. It signals a further rapprochement of the militantly ironic stance of the postmodern with the comforting, middle-classy closures of the sentimental lyric, as announced in the cheeky opening homage to Robert Frost, which is singled out by Robert Hass in his afterword: "The girls are drifting in their ponytails/ and their pig iron boat. So much for Sunday./ The dodo birds are making a racket/ to beat the band. You could have come too." Among other vaguely discernible narratives, "Casino Night" finds the poet faced with a choice between reading and "Hook's Casino": "I got the roil of/ American swells, the bugs and the sad TV sedimentation,/ the gamboling cells under glass in the stratified light,/ a limpid one-two over chips on the felt./ I might not be right." Others, like the single sentence elegy "Song for the Spirit of Natalie Going," rollick on a dense info-stream of alliteration reminiscent of a howling, be-bop Hopkins: "...in seersucker bib, overalled, astonished, in dazzling fix/ on the small crawling lights in their spaceship of night.../ bezzed by mobile HEH HEH..." While some poems seem based more on a heavily allusive but unstated argument for a postmodern poetry rather than the mundane, but felt, need for it, the book's desire to astound, contort, pervert and yet sing at all turns makes it a singular delight.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
Susan Wheeler's Smokes looks like a book that sets itself the task of continuous inventions and surprise...What makes Smokes such an exhilarating and unexpected performance is not the idiom, which Ms. Wheeler has down and carries off with brio, but her witty ear...it's like listening to the still chancy and experimental transmission of the postmodern vehicle gleefully downshifting into the breezy updrafts of the traditional musics of English verse, and then lurching into the future again.
Smokes contains elegies, poems of urban and domestic angst, laments, invectives, cakewalks, struts. It's very much of the moment but it is also a deeply literary book how could it not be? And its confident, rueful, and playful grasp of its tradition is eye-opening and, sardonic as it is, boisterous fun. -- Robert Hass
The poems in Susan Wheeler's new book play with traditional poetic language and forms while presenting images of the modern and often televised world. They juxtapose the possessive pronouns "thy" and "thou" with chia pets, Tab A inserts, ice pops, Jersey tomatoes and jujubes. These images have a surreal vibrancy that immediately appeals to the reader. The approach is inventive and often clever. She even has a sonnet about cockroaches: "You cockroaches! Get thee off and how!" The work has an enjoyably absurd postmodern playfulness. Some of these poems disappoint, however, because they are so abstracted from daily life. While poetic language draws heavily from the subconscious, it surprises and delights because it still manages to reflect our experience. The work has an emotionally anemic quality which adds to the level of abstraction. Some phrases are disjointed or slightly obscure: "I could not find the phlox, the star/To restorate the taken-over." The reader may feel that he or she is seeing funhouse mirror reflections of an unfamiliar world. -- From Independent Publisher
This smart, frustrating, entertaining second collection includes a few exceptional, musical poems no one else could have written . . . Robert Hass's perceptive Afterword highlights Wheeler's peculiar virtues: her ear; her song-like forms, when she uses them; and her appropriations of old poems and old subgenres palinode, obsequy, aubade. . . My favorite of Wheeler's poems is her incantatory blare "Shanked on the Red Bed," a desperate, desperately weird, entertaining, serious love-lost-and-sought poem for a news-drenched world. -- Boston Review Summer 1998
