If This Isn’t Love/ poems by Susana H. Case/ book review by Karen Hildebrand

If This Isn’t Love/ Poetry by Susana H. Case/ Broadstone Books 2023
review by Karen Hildebrand



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The opening poem, “Love Stories for Girls,” tees up Susana H. Case’s newest collection with a popular premise that much romantic folly is due to certain expectations we are fed from an early age. 



Every distortion I learned about love

came from romance comics 

and later, telenovelas.

I blame the words love at first sight.

Walking in the rain,

walking on beaches,

dancing on beaches.

Red sports cars. 



Here, in 22 succinct lines, is what the remaining poems of If This Isn’t Love will build on,

pulling in nostalgia for rock-n-roll lyrics and afternoons at the movies as proof for the speaker’s tongue-in-cheek hypothesis: 



I blame kissing. Really—  

kissing fries the brain  

and afterward, everyone ends up in love 

with an inappropriate person,  

and they’re never the same again.



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A series of 13 poems, each titled “Telenovela,” becomes a central organizing structure for the collection as they lay out a plot synopsis for a running Italian television soap opera:



The secret is out:

Riccardo’s wife, Virginia,

went to bed

with his brother

because adultery 

with family members

makes good TV.

It was only once!  

She pleads.  (from “Telenovela 2”)





Watch Chiara vacuuming lines from the coffee table

up her sassy nose;

she is addicted to blow. Nunzio,

her lover, doesn’t know. 



What does she see in him?

Handsome—very, but he tails her, jealous

of her dilettante friend,

with whom he believes she’s involved,

doesn’t realize he’s her drug dealer.  (from “Telenovela 9”)



The telenovela poems are a stage from which Case launches her speaker’s personal romantic episodes. This is a risky strategy because surely a real life romance will seem tepid next to the high drama of a telenovela. Not so with If This Isn’t Love, as Case wickedly lays out tale after tale that holds its own against Ricardo, Rosella, Marina and Fabrizio. Take, for instance, “Ghost Apple”:



A man who proposed marriage to me

liked to dress up in women’s clothing.

I said no, but not for that reason.



He had a temper, threw water glasses

into the fireplace when he wasn’t sedated

enough from drink, and I didn’t like his anger



or his boozing. He ordered women’s dresses,

straight skirts, high-heeled shoes

from a catalog. The styles had somber colors,



came with blazers—nothing I would have worn,

but I loved him, helped him choose. 



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It’s the cadence of Case’s lines that allows her to pull this off. The collection is comprised of free verse poems, justified to the left margin, conveyed in a conversational tone with line breaks that easily lead the reader’s eye down the page, almost as if prose. Case infests her poems with sharp wit and not a wasted word. An example of her artful compression is on display in the opening lines of “Frank O’Hara Tells the Mothers of America to Let Their Kids Go to the Movies:” 



My mother half-obeyed,

said okay, but only every other week.

That had more to do with a belief



in fresh air than a revolt

against content, but it meant I missed

The Blob until the remake.



What I did get to see was Two Women,

after having to stick out my chest and lie

about my age to a dubious matron



who decided not to care.

Two Women, the movie

in which after her rape, a girl’s hair



suddenly was longer, a filmmaking

error—don’t worry, the creep was killed.



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We begin to understand where the speaker gets her gimlet eye in “Greyhound Bus,” when a sixteen-year-old brings along John Updike as reading material for an overnight bus ride across the South with a father who sips bourbon from a flask. Case brings a tough girl irreverence to even the most sobering topics, tossing a phrase like “the whole buzzkill event” into a poem about abortion (“The Erasure”): “I want to tell you about my abortion— / vacuum pumps, blood, the whole / buzzkill event, but all I say is, / I’m feeling a little off, just want to sleep.” So it sneaks up on me that she is using her entertaining style to make a political statement about the fate of women that goes beyond what I initially saw as relatively benign romantic misapprehension. Such is the purpose of “Night, Guatemala City,” about prostitution: “Babies, too, are sold, children selling children, / beholden to gangs.” The poem ends with, “The market place is busy. Everywhere, / working women die destitute.”



Such is the power of Case’s writing—that she had me nodding in recognition from page one, over the happily-ever-after idea of love that ruins us from the start. It should be a disaster. It is a disaster. And god help me, I’m laughing—until I’m not. Indeed, the speaker’s smart mouth is a Band-Aid over a tender heart, evidenced in a poem where a fortune teller “wraps his cobra gently / around me, weighty and cold. The cobra / hoods its neck ribs and hisses.” 



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Is it best to cut off love when it isn’t enough?

The fortune teller doesn’t know,

with his long white beard,

silver rings on every finger, only responds

we love the way we’ve been loved. 



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Susana H. Case is the author of nine books of poetry, including If This Isn’t Love (Broadstone Books 2023).  Dead Shark on the N Train, Broadstone Books, 2020, which won a Pinnacle Book Award for Best Poetry Book, was a NYC Big Book Award Distinguished Favorite, and a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. She is also the author of five chapbooks. Her first collection, The Scottish Café, Slapering Hol Press, 2002, was re-released in a dual-language English-Polish version, Kawiarnia Szkocka, Opole University Press, 2010. Her poems have also been translated into Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. With Margo Taft Stever, Case has co-edited the anthology I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe, Milk and Cake Press, 2022. In 2021, she became a co-editor of Slapering Hol Press. www.susanahcase.com. 



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Karen Hildebrand (reviewer), a poet and dance writer, is the author of Crossing Pleasure Avenue (Indolent Books, 2018). Her newest poems appear in Defunct, LEON, Maintenant, No Dear, Pigeon Pages, Poetry Bay, Quarter After Eight, Scoundrel Time, Slipstream, South Florida Poetry Journal, “Walt’s Corner” of The Long Islander, and Braving the Body, an anthology forthcoming from Terrapin Books. She holds an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and resides in Brooklyn.