“Many of these poems unfold in Rose Valley, a psych ward mythic as Ginsberg’s Rockland. Rose Valley is the tip of a spoon scraping cherry ice, a red dress with a razor in the hem, a grand balustrade that the poet—an ‘anima mala’ richly arrayed in her own ‘nerves and gemlets’—promenades, tap-sweeping her white cane. These poems are narcotic. Linguistic ambition and pain tangle up in them. Is it wrong to luxuriate in work shot through with pain? I can’t help it. I am glad to witness real bodies in these poems. I like very much that they are full of women and the feel of community—the sharing and overlapping of damage—and love.”
—Joy Katz, author of All You Do is Perceive and The Garden Room
“What a wild ballet Jill Khoury gives us in Suites for the Modern Dancer—poems of a blind girl with her white cane, and her sense of how people see her when they think she can’t see them—and how wrong they are; poems of Rose Valley, a mental hospital where the girls whose bodies fill this remarkable first collection become ‘sphere and feathers, thorns, knotholes, electricity, fractured light.’ I love the rage in this voice against all the ways in which we as women, as people with disabilities, are defined, constrained, erased, but I love even more the way Khoury’s jagged yet precise lyric traces the ineluctable way these bodies transcend expectations, flaring out into a gorgeous theatre in which the soul is untethered and it is beautiful. This is a fierce book and a necessary one.”
—Sheila Black, author of Wen Kroy and co-editor of Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability
“In Suites for the Modern Dancer, Jill Khoury locates the body through the shifting collision of opposites: ‘Say she was one of the lucky ones / Say she wasn’t one of the lucky ones.’ With incisive movement, Khoury stuns us into beauty: ‘Each bead shines like an eye. Their glass sides click / together in the valley of his palm.’ This is an original voice of deepening vision—we feel the dance of sound, we feel the world edges shift, until we find ourselves without bearings—emerging into the open field of this courageous book.”
—Jan Beatty, author of The Switching/Yard