The Irrationalist by Suzanne Buffam

Canarium Books, 2010. I've been all about Suzanne Buffam since reading a few short poems of hers in the first issue of Canarium One, an occasional literary anthology I hope gets its sequel soon. That was in 2008, and the poems printed in Canarium One appear in her second book, The Irrationalist, which I am longingly looking at above. The book is in three sections, the first and third moving inspiringly between poems in an extended sequence (the Interior poems), a few prose poems, a winning revision of the sonnet form with "mixed media," and a good number of just fantastic lyrics that run her seriousness of thought through her almost whimsical tone. Enough there for a strong book of poetry, but Buffam amps everything up with section II, Little Commentaries, a section of short verses on anything from possibility, to St. Augustine, to "last lines," to "ghosts vs. zombies." Give them a shot, and I promise you'll be memorizing a different commentary every week, will see them popping up all around you in their wit and pith, and perhaps most of all, their surreal wisdom.