Setting Fire To The White Picket Fences Of An Imaginary Nation

Raised in Darien, CT, Susan Cossette-Eng, tonight’s featured Open Mic poet, writes frequently in rebellious defense of genuine relationships, love and the sanctity of just plain individual humanity (especially relating to women) against the Plasticville artifice and faux freedom of the American suburban ideal that keeps us from effective engagement with the larger world.

Here is a sample from last October:

A scene from Bryan Forbes’ The Stepford Wives 

(1975), shot in Darien’s Goodwives’ Shopping Center

unhinged

Unhinged, unglued,
unspeakable

this is nothing new–

These doors wide open,
window screens torn
white picket fence, now kindling–

My new normal is born.

Unusual,
Unreal,
Unstoppable

The train on its tracks–

tilt-shifted photo of an actual tract housing develop-
ment betrays the toy-like unreality of suburban life 

Racing toward nothing,
an unnamed station
in an imaginary nation

There’s no turning back.

Such sparse eloquence is currently being collected in Life: Version 2.1, a forthcoming chapbook and can also be enjoyed at “MusePalace”, Susan’s blog of her latest poetry, ruminations and links to the writing of others addressing consonant themes, like Denise Duhamel’s “Kinky”  (a piece that translates the stylized imagery of the iconic Barbie and Ken dolls into the realm of flesh-and-blood eroticism) and the ouvre of James Scully, the acclaimed poet with whom she studied (along with Marilyn Nelson Wamiek).

book accessory for 1965 Slumber Party Barbie

A graduate with an M.A. in English from UConn-Storrs, Susan is a two-time recipient of the university’s Wallace Stevens Prize for Poetry and has also done post-graduate work at the City University of New York Graduate Center.   

Find out more about Susan at AuthorsDen.

Hosted by Frank Chambers and PoemAlley's Nick Miele, the Barnes & Noble's Open Mic Poetry program meets the second Monday of each month in the cookbook section on the main floor of the bookstore (located in the Stamford Down Center), beginning at 7:15 p.m.

For more information, contact:

Barnes & Noble

100 Greyrock Place Suite H009

Stamford, CT 06901

203-323-1248

Though dated, the following music video to Rush’s “Subdivisions” expresses the suffocating alienation still peculiar to growing up in today’s built-up “apocalypse”:

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Of related interest:

Books

The Way We Never Were: American Families And The Nostalgia Trap, Stephanie Coontz (Basic Books, 2000)

Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream, Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Jeff Speck (North Point Press, 2010) 

Class:a Guide Through the American Status System, Paul Fussell (Touchstone, 1994)

The Fifties: a Women’s Oral History, Brett Harvey (HarperCollins, 1993)

Too Much Magic: WishfulThinking, Technology and the Fate of the Nation, James Howard Kunstler (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2012)

Online

“Is Barbie Based On a German Sex Doll?”, Adja’s Blog, June 2011

"'Don't eat!': Controversial 1965 Slumber PartyBarbie came with scales permanently set to just 110lbs and 1a diet book tellingher not to eat", Martha De Lacey, Daily Mail, November 2012