Weapons Grade: Poems

In her poetry Terese Svoboda walks out to the edge where language is made and destroyed. Her subject is human suffering. Called adisturbing, edgy and provocativea by Book Magazine, her work is often the surreal poetry of a nightmare yet is written with such wit, verve, and passion that she can address the direst subjects.

Weapons Grade is a collection of poems about the power of occupationapolitical and personal. They often play with sestina, sonnet, and couplets, as if only form can contain the fury of between the occupier and the occupied. There's a pervading sense of dread, of expiation, of portentsaeven in potato salad. There's also elegy and lullaby and seduction but, in the words of the sixties tune Wooly Bully, the reader must Watch it now, watch it. Highly poised, grand and intensely lyrical, the poems veer from the political to the personal, then finish on the elegiac, releasing complex and unexpected meaning with emotional precision. Looking directly into the contemporary apocalyptic, Weapons Grade, Svobodaas fifth collection of poetry, draws readers back to the radiant present.

"Svoboda's fifth collection of poems walks the borders where the personal and the political meet, and where ironic humor and foreboding overlap. Her contemporary America is both 'finger-licking digital,' and a place where there are 'soldiers in mother's hair.' In this book's first section, war is everywhere, from a lab in Tokyo where AIDS-infected blood was used for transfusions to 'the cavities of your body.' Section two takes up notions of mistranslations, misunderstandings and missed opportunities: in one poem, 'a man walks into a bra'; in another a son asks of a missing father, 'Is he back or forth?' The final section takes up more personal subjects, as in a poem titled 'To My Brother, on the Occasion of His Second Breakdown.' Throughout, Svoboda's poems are as haunting as they are funny, as pleasurable as they are powerful. (Sept.)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)