The Principle Agent

“With dazzling lucidity and assurance, Sarah Suzor explores realms of doubt and uncertainty, of loss and the wanderings of rumor and legend. In The Principle Agent, Suzor captures the contingent quality of the truths we live by, observing, ‘It’s not, however, a question of sincerity,/but more what I grow numb to in its absence.’ The buoyant rhythms and patterning of this striking debut collection vie with the “anguish of curiosity” that draw the poet on. Agile of intellect, resolute in courage, Sarah Suzor calls into question the very nature of agency even as she proceeds to catalyze new equations, new antidotes and new choices that show us, finally, a world where ‘West is just west, and it never runs out.'”

-Elizabeth Robinson

Reading this young poet’s first book-length collection is an adventure-heading upriver to a stretch of water unlike anything one has found below. Hers is Western poetry, shaped from a necessity that isn’t so much literary as displaced, best suited to moving on. As Suzor herself puts it, ‘not in summation, but in addition to.'”

-Paul Vangelisti

Suzor seems to channel Sappho in her lean modern-day poems, a narrative made up of fragments that expose a razor-sharp intelligence, an unnerving sophistication, an echo of the poet Anne Carson.”

-Elaine Sexton