The Damage Done, poetry by Susana H. Case

Publication Date: February 1, 2022

Paperback, 100 pages

ISBN: 978-1-956782-00-4

$24.00 retail, $18.50 from publisher

The “damage done” in Susana H. Case’s remarkable poetry thriller set in late 1960s New York City is of two orders. On the surface, this is the story of Janey, a fashion model whose death under mysterious circumstances serves as an opportunity for a corrupt FBI agent in the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) to frame Janey’s Black Panther lover for her death, making them both collateral damage in J. Edgar Hoover’s clandestine war on anyone he deemed un-American. But on another level, as Case instructs us, the greater damage done is to democracy itself, to trust and faith in government, an enduring legacy of suspicion and division that serves as a cautionary tale at a moment when those divisions and distrust are more enflamed than ever. That’s a tall order for a volume of poetry, but Case more than succeeds in this audacious, breathtaking collection.

Praise for Susana H. Case & The Damage Done

Susana H. Case has written a remarkable tale in The Damage Done, poetry you can’t stop reading or listening to. You’re in the late sixties, early seventies, when the Vietnam War protests, racism, and federal corruption are rampant in the U.S. There’s a beautiful woman who’s a gun-runner and pill-popper. There’s murder. There’s a Karmann Ghia. And a Jimi Hendrix look-alike. The Black Panther Party is targeted by the FBI (COINTELPRO), which, among other things, prevents a local detective from doing his job. There’s electronic bugging, stoolies, snitches, and setups. Paranoia stars in this tale—paranoia, which in that era often turned out to be true. And throughout the chaos, the poet’s voice rings clear and honest. “Order unravels ugly,” she writes in the letter “Dear Disorder.” And yet the order of this story in verse, aided by lyrical notes in the back, unravels beautiful. A must read.

—Anne Harding Woodworth, author of Trouble (Turning Point) & The Last Gun (Cervena Barva Press)

Fierce, witty, snapping with intelligence and dark as f, Susana H. Case's The Damage Done introduces a new take on the poem noir. The crime story—fiction inspired by facts—is set squarely in the 60s, early 70s, but we know how elements of one era bleed into the next, and into the one after that. We are not yet done with such misdeeds, such misfortune, and the apparatus of dirty tricks.

—Suzanne Lummis, author of Open 24 Hours (Lynx House Press) and host of the YouTube series They Write by Night, produced by a poetry.la, a serio-comic mingling of poetry and film noir.

In The Damage Done, Susana H. Case has written a page-turner of a suspense thriller in poetic form. These sequences create a compelling narrative, dramatizing the life and death of Janey, a young woman hounded, harassed, and ultimately murdered by an operative of the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover’s infamous COINTELPRO—a “sophisticated vigilante program,” that destroyed lives of civil rights activists, Vietnam War protestors, and progressive sympathizers caught in the crossfire. Janey’s offense that renders her a threat to corrupt agents of the law? Her drug use, her love affair with and financial support for a low-level member of the Black Panther Party. This book is meticulously researched, alive with the voices of key characters (troubled detective, cynical FBI crooks, conniving snitches, and Janey herself, dying of anorexia if the FBI hitman hadn’t gotten her first), and the politics and popular music of that dangerous era, with concluding notes that are as clear as the sordid truths subsequently uncovered by the Church Committee investigation. The edge-of-my-chair reading experience of The Damage Done opens our eyes to that devastating history and brings it alive in spare but poetic language.

—Carolyne Wright, author of Masquerade & This Dream the World: New & Selected Poems (both from Lost Horse Press).

About the Author

SUSANA H. CASE is the author of eight books of poetry, including Dead Shark on the N Train, Broadstone Books, 2020, which won a Pinnacle Book Award for Best Poetry Book, was a NYC Big Book Award Distinguished Favorite, and a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. She is also the author of five chapbooks. Her first collection, The Scottish Café, Slapering Hol Press, 2002, was re-released in a dual-language English-Polish version, Kawiarnia Szkocka, Opole University Press, 2010. Her poems have also been translated into Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. With Margo Taft Stever, Case has co-edited the anthology I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe, Milk and Cake Press, 2022. In 2021, she became a co-editor of Slapering Hol Press. www.susanahcase.com.