4 Rms w Vu

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4 Rms w Vu, Susana H. Case’s latest collection, consists of poems focused on human connections in their various manifestations, including: romantic relationships, both whole and broken, parent-child relationships, and our relationship to death and loss. The work uses the metaphorical floor plan of a New York City apartment, though the rooms are somewhat of a departure from the conventional kitchen and living room, to organize mind and memory. The view alluded to in the abbreviated parlance of a real estate listing is outward, but especially inward, where sometimes it’s necessary to struggle with true understanding, to try to blast through the bricked-up barriers to insight regarding motivation and action. Organized into four sections or rooms, Susana H. Case’s poems examine a bedroom where a woman’s current husband is situated, the family room in which her parents, as well as herself as a child, reside, the storage room of memories of a first husband and various lovers, and a dying room for those others already lost, as well as the author’s intimations of her own mortality. Loss is part of the past, as well as the future, and this collection contains the constant recognition of how vulnerable are the things we hold dear. Still, Case is defiant in the face of the mistakes of the past, which she looks at unblinkingly. As she moves from room to room, she discourses on love, sex, dogs, music, travel, movies, and everything that she believes makes a good life possible, the life she wants and intends to live. She is walking through the rooms of her memory in order to find answers to the question of how to live life fully, without regret at the end.