Pacific Shooter: Poems

Pacific Shooter is a book of transformations as insubordinate and subversive as Ovid’s Metamorphoses – and with all the taste and twang of a new language. The bourgeois reader will hate it: there’s too much magic, too much genius, too much linguistic bliss.

– Susan Mitchell, from her judge’s citation.

Susan Parr’s poetry is an orchestra of rim-shots and flashbang intimacy. ‘Wind a sheet around all,’ she croons in this vivid collection, ‘then bring into the dark this beatific twill.’ Her poems pop and vibrate on armatures of spiked sonics and an intellect that twirls with dazzling humor. Awash in verbal intimacies, Parr never forgets to mean, and in doing so she’s turned up the potency – a needle of her verse has a laser’s power. Pacific Shooter is the playful sweetness in our last breath, and in these pages, Parr will ‘afford you / the machine: the logomotive yo-yo. Go man,’ her poems clap. ‘Go: yo, yo.’
– Alex Lemon.