Failure to Thrive

“'Words like good and beauty frequent/ the same bars I do,' Suzannah Showler writes in her intoxicating debut, Failure to Thrive, a stiff Corpse Reviver raised in defiance of their prohibition. Drink its paradoxical music, its convivial elisions which aren’t lapses of judgment, or aesthetic blackouts, but the subtending of our companionable faults. Please enjoy recklessly." —Michael Lista, author of Bloom

"Though the news coming from the world inhabited by these whipsmart poems is almost all bad – at times, laughably so – Suzannah Showler somehow manages to keep things out of the ditch, and even muster a pained compassion for the underemployed, disenfranchised, overmatched and disappointed crowd that is her generation. Tuned to the music of real speech, and alive with humour, sadness and surprise, this sly debut collection shows naysayers they needn’t fret so much about the future of our poetry. It’s in good hands."—Kevin Connolly

"Suzannah Showler’s is a grievous, sly, darkly witty, and imperiled voice that gathers up history’s bloated and abstract shame then collapses that, somehow, into the crackling mysterium tremendum of the present. These unnerving, centrifugal poems stand mugging, moping, off in a hazed distance, even as they monitor your more extreme worries from inside your head. They lose themselves in hyper-mediated experience even as they rifle through your medicine cabinet, breaking out in a cold sweat. This is a startling collection. The demonic shares a stage with the heartbroken, and the just plain broken. When Showler says, off-handedly and without warning, “Let’s think about the desert.” I’m willing to try."—Ken Babstock