Terese Svoboda

Theatrix: Poetry Plays Terese Svoboda

Let's hear it for play! We've already got COVID and malfeasance in politics and police brutality. In Terese Svoboda's eighth book of poetry, Theatrix: Poetry Plays, Shakespeare, Beckett, Hair, absurdist theater, the usher (the Fall of the House of) and theater made behind bedsheets ghost through this book to explode our notion of subject and the fourth wall. Though the book also includes a Title IX report, the torture of a South Sudanese governor, Chernobyl, the murder of a NYC prostitute, and god-knows-what those schipperkes were doing for the French resistance - everywhere the poetic line claims its place as a stage for the world. Even the title puns on tricks as poetry plays at the genre of drama, and the suffix trix does the job of turning the masculine POV into the feminine (e.g. aviator, aviatrix). Elements of dramatic writing like interruptions or asides found inside brackets and character names cast in majuscule punctuate, but do not dominate the book as the poetry slides in and through drama. Linked by an absurdist tone that combines the surreal, the political, and broad slapstick, often in one fell swoop, the poems in Theatrix: Poetry Playsdon't want to be put on, they want to play in the reader's head, the mind being the greatest stage of all.