Susie Campbell's The Bitters (Dancing Girl, 2014)

This ambitious pamphlet is excellent. Here are some favourite passages:


It is biting down it is a red cut when is it a green. It is a red green.

from "the way we bruise"

(a poem, in part, about lettuce)

         all these names Alice Jane Catherine Eliza Edith and Grace
little snowstorms of unreason blowing around the haunted ward

from "Casebook"

Go about it gently--brightly--a light-footed trick. Don't pay it too much attention, don't always feel what is felt.

*

Let the green come down. Let it fall.

from "Sayonara Libertyville"

 

Bake the pie for 25 miracles and reduce the temple to 350 delusions and bake until the top is golden brown, another 30 miracles. 

the opening sentence of "Strawberry Malfunction"

The oven grows in the dark. Out of one feast comes many....

from "The Oven"

Nobody pays for gold and silver to be conservative.

*

I sicken at the floss of it, the twist and count, knotted in cerise, gimped in rose.

*

...an innocent excision of threads from the ordinary....

from "White Work"

These are common duties.

Cheerily brutal.

You have to do it 

and do it.

from "Funeral Feast"

This opening's a ripped

paper membrane 

pearl soft

against my cheek

and a little green bridge

I cannot cross

end of "Snowdrop"

A box: a casing, a continuation, a context.

*

There will be neither lack not superfluity of paper at any edge or angle. Rent is a heavy item.

from "Homework, ii. boxes"

Me. That little whore

with a pebble in her breast

a box of sharp tools

and no hope of heaven.

end of "Wyvern"

You can purchase the pamphlet from the press here.