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In her poetry Terese Svoboda walks out to the edge where language is made and destroyed. Her subject is human suffering. Called “disturbing, edgy and provocative” by Book Magazine, her work is often the surreal poetry of a nightmare yet is written with such wit, verve, and passion that she can address the direst subjects.
Weapons Grade is a collection of poems about the power of occupation—political and personal. They often play with sestina, sonnet, and couplets, as if only form can contain the fury of between the occupier and the occupied. There's a pervading sense of dread, of expiation, of portents—even in potato salad. There's also elegy and lullaby and seduction but, in the words of the sixties tune "Wooly Bully," the reader must "Watch it now, watch it." Highly poised, grand and intensely lyrical, the poems veer from the political to the personal, then finish on the elegiac, releasing complex and unexpected meaning with emotional precision. Looking directly into the contemporary apocalyptic, Weapons Grade, Svoboda’s fifth collection of poetry, draws readers back to the radiant present.
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In this stunningly original collection of seventeen short stories, Terese Svoboda navigates a terrain of alienation and loss with searing, poetic prose. “I talk like a lady who knows what she wants,” begins the vagrant narrator of the title story. She insists there’s a wild child hiding among the cows in the gully near her home. Others in the trailer park think it’s just herself she’s chasing, but no one helps her sort out the truth—until there’s a murder. Stark and disturbing, “Trailer Girl” is a story of cycles of child abuse and the dream to escape them. In “Psychic” a clairvoyant knows she’s been hired by a murderer, in “Leadership” a tiny spaceship lands between a boy and his parents, in “Lost the Baby” a partying couple forget where they dropped off their baby, and in “White” a grandfather explains to his grandson how a family is like a collection of chicken parts. Frequently violent, always passionate, these often short short stories are not the condensed versions of longer works but are full-strength, as strong and precise as poetry. Watch the Trailer Girl book trailer on YouTube. (20091201)...
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After her Uncle's suicide, Terese Svoboda investigates his stunning claim that MPs may have executed their own men during the occupation of Japan after World war II [Our captain] commended us for being good soldiers and doing our job well and having a minimum of problems. Then he dropped a bomb. He said the prison was getting overcrowded, terribly overcrowded.
As a child Terese Svoboda thought of her uncle as Superman, with “Black Clark Kent glasses, grapefruit-sized biceps.” At eighty, he could still boast a washboard stomach, but in March 2004, he became seriously depressed. Svoboda investigates his terrifying story of what happened during his time as an MP, interviewing dozens of elderly ex-GIs and visiting Japan to try to discover the truth.
In Black Glasses Like Clark Kent, winner of the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, Svoboda offers a striking and carefully wrought personal account of an often painful search for information. She intersperses excerpts of her uncle’s recordings and letters to his wife with her own research, and shows how the vagaries of military justice can allow the worst to happen and then be buried by time and protocol ...
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