The Kingdom of the Subjunctive: Poems

Riddled with mistranslations, misappropriations, and malapropisms, Suzanne Wise imagines the world as a postmodern police state under attack: tables turn, tea carts explode, floorboards melt, ceilings sail off. Like the rebel girls in her poem "The Ghetto of Blasphemy," Wise takes aim at the official rhetoric of patriarchy and reveals gender to be a tattered assemblage pieced together from a looted past. Wise charts the self through an inquiry into language, moving from World War II to a future where victim, oppressor, and bystander pose as the same person. Darkly comic, deeply feminist, The Kingdom of the Subjunctive is the last territory, an if-only border zone where doubt and desire are the laws of the land.