Suburban Sutras by Austin Sanchez-Moran

Reading Suburban Sutras, as I am, during a global pandemic, a national uprising against systematic racism in America, and amid our president’s embrace of strongman rhetoric, white supremacy, and fascist tactics, I must call Austin Sanchez-Moran a fierce political poet, who calls into question his own privilege, and who confronts unflinchingly the bitter burlesque that is our age. Read at an earlier time, I might have focused on the poems’ madcap, surreal, and topsy-turvy world, on their slapstick pranks and wicked humor, and on their trickster-smarts and mischief, but today I must praise his candor, his piercing insight, and his cunning, sharp-edged humor in the face of the tragic.

–Eric Pankey, Author of Alias: Prose Poems

Like a series of lyric Twilight Zone episodes, the poems in Austin Sanchez-Moran’s Suburban Sutras twist familiar scenes in uncanny ways: A man is plucked from his hotel lobby and dropped into a military coup. Children in small-town America eat cake off the bodies of their town’s founders. A commuter train derails and is swallowed by vines before the speaker’s eyes. The deft surrealism of this collection exposes the racism and classism that permeate America’s “gulag of opulence.” These poems amaze with their imagination and insight.

–Nick Lantz, Author of You, Beast

Suburban Sutras, Austin Sanchez-Moran’s daring debut collection arrives at a time when white America is just starting to acknowledge its long racist history, a time of absurd economic inequity and deep racial, political, social, and moral division. How does a white poet of this nightmarish history, a poet from the privileged white suburbs wake up from the decadent ennui of his privilege? Sanchez-Moran does it by facing his somnambulant past and his family’s wealth, by exposing his own protected ignorance and complicity in the long nightmare. He composes not only autobiographical poems but also absurdist fables, sutras in the spirit of Magritte, Dali, or the Twilight Zone.  His poems are alarms meant to wake the sleepy suburbs.  I can still feel the hand shaking my shoulder.

–Jennifer Atkinson, Author of The Thinking Eye