Dead Shark on the N Train - Poetry by Susana H. Case

Publication Date: June 1, 2020
Paperback, 96 pages
ISBN: 978-1-937968-66-3

Available from Small Press Distribution

The middle section of this new poetry collection from Susana H. Case consists of ekphrastic poems inspired by the crime scene dioramas of Frances Glessner Lee, the “mother of forensic science.” How appropriate, for this entire collection is an exercise in forensics, as Case deploys her poetic powers of detection to investigate and interrogate life in its minutest details; and all too often she too is depicting acts of violence, committed against women, against migrants, against the marginalized. Early on she questions the “puzzling utility” of her “street light eyes,” but those eyes miss nothing, and it seems as well that she has missed no opportunity to learn from what they have seen, whether it is recognizing that “everything was happening” even while it seemed to her adolescent self that “nothing nothing nothing happened,” or taking from an encounter with a baby skunk in a tent the lesson “Don’t move. / Don’t make a sound.”

Fortunately that silence yields profound words here, as in the title poem where a quintessentially quirky New York City experience of, quite literally, a dead shark in a subway car provides an occasion for meditation on death and destinations, what we see and what we don’t, and how long we can journey to end up not so far from where we began. Remind me none of this will kill me,” she writes in one poem – except sometimes it can, and does, and she does not flinch from putting even the “shriveled flesh” of a dying friend into her poetry. If this sounds grim, it can be, but the sure touch and precision of Case’s language elevates her work from any sense of morbid voyeurism. Nor does she spare herself from this examination, as in the closing poem where she grapples with her own physical fragility and the limits of language to express it.

Recalling how she came to say “icebox” for refrigerator from her mother, she remembers a time she “did not have the vocabulary,” and how since then she learned “Words deceive, the way love is often inarticulate.” Case is certainly not the first poet to distrust language, the tools of her craft, nor the first to wonder about who is listening, “you people, / you whom I don’t even write for.” Those of us who are listening, for whom she is writing even when she is not sure herself, are fortunate indeed to receive these poems. It is perhaps an outrageous pun to call this a “Case report,” but as an account of her poetic forensics it is an essential document of our time.


Praise for Susana H. Case & Dead Shark on the N Train

Susana H. Case is a poet at the peak of her craft. Her previous books and chapbooks have each depicted with skill her artistic obsessions— ruthlessness of time, the juxtaposition between one’s public persona and the self, injustices of society, and all the small or enormous acts of violence towards women and girls—with intelligence, empathy, and unsentimental precision. The poems in this collection sing even louder with these truths. In the second poem of the book, she writes, “I know/ that to be my own salvation,/ I have to get down from the mountain/ before dark.” Dead Shark on the N Train takes us from Queens to destinations beyond, as she contemplates Marilyn Monroe, Maria Callas, school shootings, an estranged friend dying of cancer, and the unforgettable crime scene dioramas of Glessner Lee. What results is a fugue of contemporary American chaos in all its beauty and brutality. I learn a lot from reading Case’s poetry. Above all, Dead Shark implores us to each be our own salvation.

—Jennifer Franklin, author of No Small Gift (Four Way Books)

In this sassy, gorgeous book, Susana H. Case takes us on one helluva ride with a dead shark as fellow passenger, brought in from the beach and left on the floor of the N Train, its jaw decorated with a Metro Card, a cigarette and a can of Red Bull. The shark is just one of the stars of Case’s seventh volume of poems. Consider, as well, “Radiance,” a scorcher of a poem about a breast: “Lie with me, lie to me,/ until your tongue burns.” If you haven’t met up with Case’s work, it’s time you did. Detective, adventurer, world traveler, professor, connoisseur of cities, of love and mystery: there is poetry here you’ve never encountered before. In one section, Case raids the minute details of crime-scene dioramas created midcentury by the late Frances Glessner Lee. In Case’s lyrics, they are studies in mayhem, murder, and blood. Who would have guessed that these two artists would give us such a long distance, magical, and utterly original collaboration?

—David Tucker, author of Late for Work (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Susana H. Case is turning into a seasoned private eye, observing lives as she leaves Queens to live across the river, but within eyeshot of her roots and the lessons of adolescence. She travels to distant geographies—the Indian subcontinent, South America, Europe— returning to paint indelible, sardonic portraits of humans and their foibles. She writes with a realist painter’s attention to gesture and tic. The truths Case reveals about bondage and freedom are as compelling as the sight of a dead shark riding the N train. A victory of sorts, the dead shark. The poet is writing her most energetic, and clearly sketched, poems in this, her strongest volume to date.

—Indran Amirthanayagam, author of Coconuts on Mars (Paperwall)

Susana H. Case is the author of seven books of poetry. Drugstore Blue, from Five Oaks Press, won an Independent Publisher Book Award (IPPY). She is also the author of five chapbooks, two of which won poetry prizes. Her most recent chapbook is Body Falling, Sunday Morning from Milk and Cake Press. One of her collections, The Scottish Café, from Slapering Hol Press, was re-released in a dual-language English-Polish version, Kawiarnia Szkocka by Opole University Press in Poland. Her poems appear widely in magazines and anthologies. Recent poems can be found in: Calyx, The Cortland Review, Fourteen Hills, Portland Review, Potomac Review, Rattle, and RHINO, among others. Dr. Case is a Professor and Program Coordinator at the New York Institute of Technology in New York City.