Small Flies: the Sudoku poems
By Susan McMaster
Poetry chapbook with letterpress-printed jacket
Limited edition of 100 copies
A New Kind of Puzzle Poem
In Small Flies: Sudoku Poems, Susan McMaster has created a new kind of puzzle poem, one based on the classic number puzzle Sudoku grid. McMaster took traditional lineated poems and transposed them, word by word, into the boxes of the grid. The results were, in her words, surprisingly satisfying. “By reading across the rows, down the columns, within each small box, and sometimes diagonally or backwards, alternates began to appear: phrases directly contradicting the poem’s theme, or moving it in another direction, or saying better in three words what the whole poem was trying to express in thirty lines. Contradictions, summations, jokes, laments.”
Susan McMaster
Susan McMaster, a past president of the League of Canadian Poets, has published some 40 books and recordings, recently Haunt, Paper Affair: Poems Selected & New, Pith & Wry: Canadian Poetry, and Crossing Arcs: Alzheimer's, My Mother, and Me. Projects include Branching Out, the first national feminist magazine; wordmusic groups First Draft, SugarBeat, and Geode Music & Poetry; and Convergence: Poems for Peace, which brought poetry to every parliamentarian in for the millenniuum. Recent prize placings include the Montreal International Poetry Prize, the Acorn-Plantos People’s Poetry Prize, and the Archibald Lampman and the Ottawa Book awards.
Author photo by Aven McMaster