Reading Groups: CM Burroughs's Master Suffering
This is the introduction and discussion thread for the reading group on CM Burroughs’s Master Suffering.
Where to Find This Book
Buy from Tupelo Press
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I chose CM Burroughs’s Master Suffering for its unwavering clarity and pushing-into illness, grief, God, and the body. It addresses unspeakable or even unrecognizable forces such as desire, mourning, faith, and misogyny.
On one level the book deals with the death of her sister’s death at 11 from liver failure after rejection of a transplant. On another, the book conveys mastery or power over us all by illness, grief, and by bodiliness. By using direct address and epistolary forms, Burroughs’s main mode is inquisition. The poems deal with body, body-history, and movement through space over time, and she accomplishes much of this through form.
Burroughs is Associate Professor of Poetry at Columbia College Chicago.
Burroughs says that “Empathy is the first thing anyone should foster to address the body in poetry” Do you agree?
“What do we do, those of us who did not die?”
How does the book use the epistolary form to make its points?
How does the speaker’s conception of the body change?
What is the difference between human suffering and female suffering?
This is the best poetry collection I've read in a long time. The poems themselves, and the story they tell.