IF THIS ISN'T LOVE, poetry by Susana H. Case

Publication Date: August 15, 2023

Paperback, 92 pages

ISBN: 978-1-956782-46-2

$25.00 retail, $18.50 from publisher

In “Love Stories for Girls” which opens Susana H. Case’s new poetry collection, she declares “Every distortion I learned about love / came from romance comics, / and later, telenovelas.” So perhaps inevitably she has taken the format of those Italian soap operas as the model for this work, but in doing so she sets out to correct those distortions and to take on love and life with clear-eyed honesty. Imagined telenovela scenarios are interspersed among episodes drawn from her own life, blurring the lines between fact and fantasy – as if to say, aren’t we all living in our own soap operas? As in her previous books her talent for compelling narrative is informed by her sociologist’s eye for the details of how real people interrelate, but more than ever here she turns that gaze on her own life. Which is why it is so good to read in the “sort-of love poem” that closes the collection that “the foolish girl who thought / she might be alone the rest of her life… ended up / fine, happy even.” Isn’t that how we want every story to end?

Praise for Susana H. Case & If This Isn’t Love

This is the good one I’ve been waiting for: tough, funny, unapologetic, powerful poetry written with skill— but without determination—to go where it wants—each story about the brutal heart made beautiful by a poem. Not since the metaphysical poets has “LOVE” been used with more cunning in the ability to show its opposites. These poems cross continents, characters, and situations, with adventure and story, proving that poetry can be riveting as well as revered. Now I want Susana H. Case to write a novel, but I would want her lyricism, cadence, esthetics on the page; so maybe better yet, another book of poems. Until then, If This Isn’t Love will be read and shared many times.

—Grace Cavalieri, Maryland Poet Laureate

In If This Isn’t Love, Susana H. Case serves up sass and sincerity in poems that navigate male/ female power dynamics often mistaken for “love.” Her renderings of the sleaze of a pimp, a sexy Zorro, Elvis’s pelvis, and the over-the-top romance of telenovelas lead way to the intimacies of divorce, abortion, a cross-dressing ex, heartache, and scandal. Case’s poems are by turns harrowing and hilarious as they explore the delights and undersides of passion.

—Denise Duhamel, author of Second Story

Poet Susana H. Case is my new best friend. She’s got a fresh mouth, a razor-sharp wit, tells it like it is—in short, not the good girl your mother would approve of. She learns that love and desire make one stupid: “Uh-oh; she’s in love. She hasn’t a clue.” This is not a woman who thrives on a diet of yoga or meditation. In If This Isn’t Love, she’s a truth-teller, no stranger to all that is human, even if it’s not nice. “People say spite poisons // the doer more than the done-upon. / Don’t believe it.” Case’s book is composed of 13 telenovelas: each one romantic, dramatic, and compelling. This book is not for the faint-hearted, but for those who can swallow hard truth—and grow wiser because of it.

—Barbara Goldberg, author of Breaking & Entering: New and Selected Poems

The poems in Susana H. Case’s If This Isn’t Love are tough and tender, serious, and whimsical. Instructional at times—just read “How to Write a Telenovela”—and confessional in others: “What happened in my thirties— / I hammered together lopsided / bookshelves, stuck them // in the mostly unused kitchen, declared / my cockroach farm home …” Unlike the telenovela form that she returns to over and over again—(“Sooner or later, a telenovela man / gets his face slapped. / Roberto, again.”)—Case sidesteps the maudlin and mawkish. No matter what else they are, these poems are always, always full of music, urgency, and grace: “Which is why I’ll end now with a ruffled blue silk dress / I put on today to float down East End Avenue, / after lockdown, practicing walking again in heels.”

—Sebastian Matthews, author of Beyond Repair: Living in a Fractured State

About the Author

If This Isn’t Love is Susana H. Case’s ninth book of poetry. The Damage Done and Dead Shark on the N Train were her prior publications with Broadstone Books. Her books have won three Pinnacle Awards, an IPPY, and a NYC Big Book Distinguished Favorite Award. They were also finalists for the American Book Fest Award, the International Book Award, and Honorable Mention for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. The first of her five chapbooks, The Scottish Café, Slapering Hol Press, was re-released in an English-Polish version, Kawiarnia Szkocka, by Opole University Press, and is being re-released in an English-Ukrainian edition. She co-edited, with Margo Taft Stever, the anthology I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe, Milk and Cake Press. Her work has been published widely in both print and online journals, including CALYX, Catamaran, The Cortland Review, Fourteen Hills, Iron Horse Literary Journal, Lily Poetry Review, Little Patuxent Review, Naugatuck River Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Portland Review, Rattle, RHINO, Spillway, SWWIM, upstreet, and many others. Case worked several decades as a university professor and program coordinator in New York City and currently is a co-editor of Slapering Hol Press, as well as a co-host of the literary series W-E: Poets of the Pandemic and Beyond. http://www.susanahcase.com/