good egg a review by A Rawlings from Namados Publishing on Susan Holbrook

namados publishers...

People think poetry is lined verse or they love a good experiment.

You’ve read Good Egg Bad Seed by Susan Holbrook or you will.

You read this book like you’re taking a quiz in Chatelaine or you write a review of Good Egg Bad Seed emulating Holbrook’s book. Or both.

You want to talk to Holbrook about her Gertrude Stein references or you wonder if she’s read Carole Maso essays.

You prefer the poetry (“Smashing through the guardrail and plummeting to your deaths you shout I love you”) or the comedy (“or you shout Fuck.”) or you wish the reviewer wouldn’t split up a wicked quote.

Canada’s micropress publishing scene, with its limited print runs and handmade chapbooks, is news to you or you can’t wait to have this rare and coveted Holbrook by your bed because you saw her at Lexiconjury last year and she was brilliant, absolutely fucking brilliant, when she won the audience over with a reading of her as-yet unpublished chapbook.

You are Susan Holbrook and you’ve written a stellar chapbook called Good Egg Bad Seed with an either/or premise that there are two kinds of people and you’re one or the other (or maybe both) because as you, being Susan Holbrook, have allowed for a binary or a multiplicity with “You are a binary thinker or you are and you aren’t” or you’re not Susan Holbrook but you wish you’d had the idea first to write a poem about two kinds of people.

You will order Holbrook’s Good Egg Bad Seed from nomadosnomados@yahoo.com or you will check out her publisher Nomados online.