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Susan M. Shultz

Susan M. Shultz is an American poet, critic, publisher and professor at the University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa. She has taught at UH since 1990, specializing in 20th century poetry, creative writing and American literature. She is the author of critical book, A Poetics of Impasse in Modern & Contemporary American Poetry, and books of poetry and prose which include, Dementia Blog, Memory Cards: 2010-2011 Series, and She’s Welcome to Her Disease: Dementia Blog. Her newest book, Memory Cards: Thomas Traherne Series was released in March 2016. Shultz also founded “Tinfish Press” in 1995, and has been publishing experimental poetry from the Pacific for 20 years. In 2014 she found the Compassion Hui, a program aiming to bring better awareness of mental health issues on campus.


Memory Cards: Thomas Traherne Series
“For many of the last 15 years, I’ve been writing my own anti-psychological memoir, Memory Cards. During much of that time, the poems have been nearly as obsessed with fact as with anywhere fact might lead. Fact can be an unkind and unforgiving muse, as it tends to pull short of truth. I have come to want, not what Joe Harrington calls the forced optimism of American culture, but a realm more spiritual than factual. Whereas I was happy with meaning early in the project (historical, cultural, simply narrative), I’m now looking to see beyond fact, or into it with some clarity.” –An excerpt from EP 39

“My desire, in these prose poems that riff off Thomas Traherne’s meditations, is to mix the poetry of fact with the poetry of attention.” –Susan M. Schultz

Comments

"Using Traherne's texts as a new kind of mirror, Schultz shows us the value in the relationships and interactions throughout the world, be it in Hawai‘i (where she resides) or further out in space (other countries, other continents) and time (other moments, other centuries). Memory Cards, dense and thorough, is also airy, exciting, provocative, and mysterious. The energy and devotion to such a vast expanse of ideas in this book is as adventurous and as it is resolute." –Greg Bem, Rain Taxi

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