If This Isn’t Love
by Susana H. Case
Broadstone Books
ISBN: 978-1-956782-46-2
$25 retail
$18.50 from publisher
Susana H. Case has done it again. Following her last book of poems, The Damage Done, her new book, If This Isn’t Love, is a sardonic look at love in all its manifestations. The poems are framed by the Italian telenovela. The poet sets out the formula for the genre in “How to Write a Telenovela.”
“Provide…
kisses, smeared-
lipstick, dresses pulled off in one smooth
movement, tossed
onto strangers’ bedroom floors.
Unrequited love, rapes,
tumors, mental hospitals, and secret
adoptions should keep the audience
tuned in for more.”
It would be churlish to call these “anti-love” poems but this is not the rainbows and unicorns kind of love. Instead, Case could be channeling Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130:
“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun…
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my
Mistress reeks.”
Case explores love in all its messiness, miscommunication, cruelty, (bad breath?) and risky innocence.
“Her walk is springy.
Uh-oh, she’s in love. She hasn’t a clue.
She hasn’t a clue that she’s walking into a minefield. And like a minefield, you don’t know you’re in one until the explosions begin. Just like in telenovelas. But there is nothing snide or condescending about the poet’s attitude toward this television genre, only ironic amusement and observations about love’s sometimes over-rated status.
“Upheaval reins as they give in to passion—
Well, who among us hasn’t?”
The poet admits that she’s been there too. We all have.
Poems such as “Ghost Apple” attest to Case’s considerable narrative and lyrical skills. The poem recounts the story of an ex-boyfriend who:
“Liked to dress up in woman’s clothing…
…after a hard day at his law office.
Nothing I would have worn,
but I loved him, helped him choose.
What ends the relationship is a trip to Mexico. A not unfamiliar story when travel abroad highlights the differences in personalities of the traveling couple.
“Years later, when I heard he died,
I wondered if it were suicide.
Part of him hinted at that, like a ghost apple
whose insides slip out easily
when the stem is still on the tree, nothing
left but a memory’s ice-crystal shell.”
The poet bravely explores filial love, admitting to the mixed emotions it can conjure. Speaking of caring for a sister, the poet writes:
“I was tired of it; her unrooting teeth repelled me.
Filial duty went so far, and then it turned
into something unpalatable, like duck fat.”
Many people have probably been there. But how many of us would have the courage to admit it?
The telenovela poems are spliced with the “real life” struggles of love suggesting that maybe these shows are not so silly after all. Like opera, they exaggerate emotions that are very real and dramatize them in order that the audience may achieve some kind of catharsis, or at least escape from their own exhausting dramas. Or, like classical Greek tragedy where characters end up committing suicide or plunging out their eyes, see Oedipus, who enacts the greatest soap opera plot of all by murdering his father and marrying his mother. Oh my!
“What’s Love Got to Do With It?” asks Tina Turner in her classic recording. She certainly found out what dangerous territory it can be. Poet Susana H. Case is our guide into this realm. But all is not negative in this wonderful collection. Overall this book of poems is brilliantly executed and finally celebratory. If This Isn’t Love takes a hard look at different forms of love and the poems “should keep the audience tuned in for more.” The reader might very well ask after all this…but is love worth it? I feel confident that poet Susana H. Case would respond:
“Absolutely!”
Jonathan Harrington
Mérida, Yucatán, México
SUSANA H. CASE has authored eight books of poetry, most recently The Damage Done Broadstone Books, 2022, which won her a third Pinnacle Book Achievement Award. Her books have previously also won an IPPY, a NYC Big Book Award Distinguished Favorite award, and she was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award and the International Book Awards. The first of her five chapbooks, The Scottish Café, Slapering Hol Press, was re-released in a dual-language English-Polish version, Kawiarnia Szkocka by Opole University Press. She co-edited, with Margo Taft Stever, the anthology I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe, Milk and Cake Press, 2022. Case worked several decades as a university professor and program coordinator in New York City and currently is a co-editor of Slapering Hol Press. http://www.susanahcase.com/.
Jonathan Harrington has published twenty books including poetry, novels, essays and translations. A graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop he has lived in Mexico for over twenty years. His latest book of poems is The Frozen Sea Within Us: New & Selected Poems (www.beltwayeditions.com). The book covers forty years of a life in poetry.