Publisher's Synopsis
"The Carnivorous Gaze" takes its meaning from the lean and hungry Cassius, who thinks too much. Anthropologist, poet, and artist, Sue Parman is a hunger artist who devours obscure words in the Oxford English Dictionary, chomps on life and love with sharp teeth, seasons death and illness with bitter wit and sweet irony, and whips up dense poetic forms and turns them airy with a playful interaction of words and art. "Thorny, witty, braided and woven and webbed, startling; dark and sweet and sad and funny; lines and passages that will haunt you for days; and behind it all a wry sharp intelligence and large open bruised heart," says Brian Doyle, author of Mink River. Parman's book is ..".a marvelous romp through anthropology, philosophy, history, and language by a poet who knows the rules and breaks them. There's music and story here, form that is played with, hopped over and stepped around, poems of humor and wit, and poems that deal honestly and imaginatively with the most momentous of life's events-death, illnesses, and found and lost loves. As a poet, Parman is crafting a personal mythology fit for a new world," according to Barbara La Morticella, author of Even the Hills Move in Waves. "Sue Parman's poems are a fabulous mix of the formal and the miraculous. She uncovers what is beneath ground and is dazzled by what exists in the light. She tenders reality-relationships, work, time, love-with a direct style that is scaffolded by complex forms and complex ideas. 'The Carnivorous Gaze' comes to see everything in human experience with a rapacious affection for life," comments David Biespiel, author of The Book of Men and Women.
