Memory Cards: 2010-2011 Series

Susan M. Schultz’s Memory Cards—prose poems composed to fit on an index card, each beginning with a randomly chosen line from a book by the poet for whom each of the nine sections is named—generates an astonishing form for infecting the lyric with the political and the political with the lyric. In Memory Cards, Schultz “uses her formidable skills as a lyric poet to re-inscribe the testimony of the victims of modernity’s incessant erasure of ordinary lives, Hawaiian, white, Asian, other. Memory Cards records our protest against the apparent cruelty of divided life, and with little sentimentality restores empathy, the near-forgotten conscience of a humanistic ideal.”

— Adam Aitken, author of Eighth Habitation