The Damage Done by Susana H. Case
Broadstone Books, 2022
The story of Janey, a fashion model found recumbent in her car by a New York City tow truck driver, captured my attention within the first two poems in The Damage Done by Susana H. Case. As I read on, my nose buried in the binding of the collection, I realized what I at first read as a murder mystery based in the late 60s is actually an interrogation on social issues of today. Careful research accompanies a skilled use of well-developed characters. Through lyric narratives and epistles, Case deep dives into corrupt law enforcement, wicked government, and the dead they leave behind.
Almost like an echo, poems traverse the decades. At least as early as the fourteenth poem, I recognized the resonance with the present.
Dear So-Called Bad Apples
Dear tightly wound killers of those already kneeling…
this country is sleepy, yawns, allows you to persist.
The similarities between events in the manuscript and now are too striking to be considered coincidental: “(Witnesses always see a black man.),” for example, or a federal agent who views informants as disposable:
… Soon a throwaway
with silencer will turn his snitch
into a corpse. They’re not riding
to Jamaica Bay to look for birds.
Case unravels the story with a novelist’s commitment to research. The murder of Janey is invented. But the circumstances surrounding her death are drawn from the factual actions of the FBI in the 1960s and 1970s, specifically the COINTELPRO and its attempts to pervade and shatter organizations such as the Black Panther Party, anti-Vietnam War mobilizations, civil rights associations, and feminist groups through any means necessary, including forgery, assassination, and illegal searches.
Running adjacent to the story, aiding a reader’s propulsion, is the poet’s lyricism. Janey is a woman troubled and troubling, wrestling with love in her marriage and her affair, “flame-licked, / chain-nicked, / … / playing with fire.” In several poems throughout the collection, the detective is granted a wholeness—as father, gardener, someone deeply bothered by the corruption of the fraternal order he belongs to—and a complexity through lines such as “mornings, nights, he thinks about / the number of teardrops the earth can hold.”
This work has many voltas, but the one that read the loudest for me was “How language gets twisted.” This line seems to summarize one of the primary expressions of The Damage Done: cultural norms endorsed or abused by the law, and the collateral damage that clings to that often comes down to the use or abuse of language. This body of work reminds readers that America’s words are indeed warped.
Having read many of Susana H. Case’s collections, I would say this is her endeavor as a poet: to allow the virtues of verse to bring into focus humanity’s intersections of innocence and guilt with the intention of bringing equity and justice to the forefront of our tongues and thus our actions.
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Angie Dribben is an autistic artist and writer living in the Appalachian region of Virginia. Her debut collection, Everygirl, was released with Main Street Rag. Her most recent work can be found in Los Angeles Review, Orion, Coffin Bell, Split Rock Review, and others.