Master Suffering

"CM Burroughs's Master Suffering is transcendent... a book-length conjuring to counter grief's entropy. It is a pulsing utterance providing solace in the dark."

--Simone Muench

"A striking, brave, and stunning book. I love Burroughs's poems and I love Master Suffering. It's not easy to make poems like these, and they are important." --Sean Singer

"Master Suffering: a directive? Or a direct address? CM Burroughs throws us off-balance before we've opened the cover of her dynamic new collection, and continues to blow us away, moving us further and more deeply with each turn of the page."

--Evie Shockley

The poems of Master Suffering pendulate between yield and command; the bodies of this book are supplicant yet seething--they want nothing more than to survive. But how does a woman survive? One's own healthy body helps, but illness is one of the masters of this book. Faith can be a salve for the inscrutable ailments of the body, but God is unreliable in these poems. The female bodies of Master Suffering want power; power to control and to correct the suffering they both witness and withstand.