Superior Packets

By Susie Timmons

• Description
• Reviews
• Bio

• 35 years worth of poems by Susie Timmons, long heralded by her peers in New York such as Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, and Eileen Myles, previously only available in small-run editions. Her poems are witty, smart, and quick, with a pleasantly surprising clarity and freshness.

• Perhaps most distinctive about Timmons’s work is its refusal to find its gravity in sadness but rather by way of an intimacy between poem and reader, a feeling of being in on the joke or accomplice to the author’s sleight of hand. Superior Packets is fresh, unexpected, classic—underappreciated poems once at risk of being forgotten, but thankfully not any longer.
  Trevor Ketner, Boston Review
  
  Timmons often employs short lines in sprawling, wild poems that are in love with the world...
  Arielle Greenberg, American Poetry Review
  
  The strength of Timmons’ work comes from her ability to shred stereotype and create a space within which garbage, photographs, the fluttering of a scarf, and historical streets converge in an exquisite minimalism devoid of rush and instead fueled by momentary quiet. We must hush ourselves to see what Timmons sees and feel what Timmons feels, giving up our own relationship to the subjective, to our own New York experiences, in favor of Timmons’ understanding.
  Clare Paniccia, Cleaver Magazine
  
  Her titles alone should give readers a sense of her poetics: low-key yet brainy, spunky yet depressive, post-second-wave New York School yet retaining that group’s hallmark East Village sensibility.
  Publishers Weekly
  
  Superior Packets is a joy to read—lucid, celebratory, enchanting, unpretentious, overabundant, sieve-like, epiphanic, bloodhounding, and imbued with a quick-witted voice that embodies and celebrates the fundamental universals we lose in the dailiness of our lives: how thoughts and feelings and experiences form, how they move, and what they might look like in their primordial state, pre-speech, when they’re still what we mean to say and not what we think people want to hear.
  Annelyse Gelman, Nomadic Press
  
  …I tend to read [Timmons] like I do [Ron] Padgett, visualizing her with a mischievous smile but a ‘straight’ face, and voice—serious, until the point of absurdity where she, and I, and you, can’t contain ourselves and laugh…
  John Yohe, Entropy
  
  The curiosity in Timmons’ poems, their questioning, is not with a childlike sense of wonder, but with an awareness and a sort of knowing sadness. Often they ask what would it have been like to be someone else, and what made that so impossible?
  Laura Henriksen, The Poetry Project

• Susie Timmons was born in Chicago and has lived in New York most of her life. Timmons first book of poetry, Locked from the Outside (Yellow Press, 1990), was the inaugural winner of the Ted Berrigan Award, judged by Alice Notley, Robert Creeley, Anselm Hollo, and Ron Padgett. Her book, Superior Packets, was published by Wave Books in 2015.