“Viral, by Suzanne Parker, both embodies and outdistances its form: an extended elegy for Tyler Clementi (the Rutgers student whose privacy was brutally invaded by his roommate and sent out on the web, precipitating Tyler’s suicide). It exceeds the elegy form and becomes a shocked, beautifully anaphoric invocation—a hopeless nonstop summons, a call-out to the lost one—to bring him back. These are relentlessly tender, impossibly empathetic poems—which echo and clarify the body of grief— '…the need to pass/through the impassable and land/in a space I fill, exactly.' The emotional tension is unbearable, but sustained, just as the human heart goes on, after unimaginable loss.” —Carol Muske-Dukes
“In language that is elegant, tender, and uncompromising, Suzanne Parker tells a story of violation and injustice not ripped from the headlines, but lost in them. Rage, as in all good art, is immersed in craft where it smolders still hot enough to scorch the reader. Parker turns tragedy into art—not for sensationalism, but an honoring of innocence, and love.” —Kurt Brown
“I admire poems that quarrel—without preaching or redundancy— with social injustice, with injustice, period. Part outrage, part elegy, these spare and exact poems move me deeply.” —Thomas Lux
“Viral, by Suzanne Parker, both embodies and outdistances its form: an extended elegy for Tyler Clementi (the Rutgers student whose privacy was brutally invaded by his roommate and sent out on the web, precipitating Tyler’s suicide). It exceeds the elegy form and becomes a shocked, beautifully anaphoric invocation—a hopeless nonstop summons, a call-out to the lost one—to bring him back. These are relentlessly tender, impossibly empathetic poems—which echo and clarify the body of grief— '…the need to pass/through the impassable and land/in a space I fill, exactly.' The emotional tension is unbearable, but sustained, just as the human heart goes on, after unimaginable loss.” —Carol Muske-Dukes
“In language that is elegant, tender, and uncompromising, Suzanne Parker tells a story of violation and injustice not ripped from the headlines, but lost in them. Rage, as in all good art, is immersed in craft where it smolders still hot enough to scorch the reader. Parker turns tragedy into art—not for sensationalism, but an honoring of innocence, and love.” —Kurt Brown
“I admire poems that quarrel—without preaching or redundancy— with social injustice, with injustice, period. Part outrage, part elegy, these spare and exact poems move me deeply.” —Thomas Lux
