Acutely Life

Acutely Life playfully or sorrowfully interrogates works of art, asking fictional characters their views on grief and generosity. Life studies, or conversations held with all sorts of unsuitable and suitable companions, these quicksilver poems are written in a style full of echoes and dark humour, trying out poses learned from other poems or wandering off with dead artists who insist on entering places they don't belong.

There's a woman somehow veiled in marble who is only for
me so I take her out of the Art Institute through a back way
and no one notices: she lives with me now, happier than in
the gallery with the cold white lights, in my home she is seen
for who she is, though the veil cannot be removed, its
hardness impenetrable, but now she can be touched.

In her poems Sue Sorensen makes visits to the Village Vanguard jazz club in June 1961, to Freud’s study in London, to the novelist Henry James. Working her allusive and spirited way inside books and paintings, she has acute meetings with musicians, photographers, fictional characters—and most of all herself.