Flame, Glass and Ink are Poems, essays, and reading notes by Stefania Joori Suh

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  • So This Is It: The Glass and the Flame

    My First book ever selected and published by an independent press. I knew that one day I would have my own book published. It is not arrogance disguised as confidence. Writing has always been part of who I am.

    The Glass and the Flame is a fugue of the heart, woven from multiple strands of longing and sorrow into a polyphony of eros and psyche. I have learned that you can write the felt without being met.

    The axiom that “you are who you are” is not necessarily true in my writing. Rather, I am what I write.

    In terms of Orwell’s reasons for writing, I write from aesthetic enthusiasm and sheer egoism. Neither political purpose nor historical impulse belongs to my work.

    If you dare, walk with me in the garden where Eros freely roams with Psyche.

    Listen to what I sing.

    The Glass and the Flame now lives in the world.
    You can find it here: https://dulcetshop.myshopify.com/products/suh

    Sincerely,

    Stefania

  • On Reading “The Thorn in the Flesh”

    Reading Day — Thursday, August 20, 2026
    On D. H. Lawrence’s “The Thorn in the Flesh”

    Lawrence must have hated the military. Well, more exactly, the rigid discipline used to tame the naturally untamed. It is against nature, against free will: the controlled mindset that conditions you to believe that if you fail, you are a loser to be put in the pillory. Not a man. Not man enough.

    Is that really so? Lawrence asks. No. A man is a man when he witnesses his desire being reciprocated in the body of his lover. Virility is true manhood because it requires no weapon of killing.

    The young German soldier in this story recovered his lost confidence through sensual passion, which collapsed the wall between institutional dehumanization and being fully alive. Naked with his lover, the soldier felt no shame in wanting and loving her. The erection of sexual passion restored physical vulnerability.

    We know Lawrence for his controversial Lady Chatterley’s Lover. So, it may be convenient to call him a sensationalist whose agenda was to challenge religious doctrine and restrictive social norms. Instead, he was a writer who stood at the heart of humanity and showed us the beauty of being human in the expression of passion, in wanting and being wanted.

    The Thorn in the Flesh is Lawrence’s version of Dostoevsky’s “Only beauty can save the world.”

    — Stephanie Joori Suh

  • The Scent of Dusk

    I still have a bottle of Old Spice  
and a bottle of Johnson & Johnson baby lotion;  
I don’t know why.  

I have left them on my vanity table  
among my bouquet of perfumes.  

To withhold the last vestige of you from time  
is like keeping a child you have left.  

Do you still use them  
on the skin of your dusk?  

The mixed scent of man and boy  
is the imprint of your paradox:  
shyness and boldness,  
beauty and violence.  

It’s domestic intimacy against time,  
against its force of forgetfulness.  

When I breathe in the scents together,  
I see my long fingers tracing your cheeks.  

Languor intoxicates the grammar of absence  
I have learned  
since you left the vertigo of you here.  

I hope you have forgotten them  
so that I can keep them here  
in my bouquet of scents—  
yours and mine.  

I keep the alphabet of your name  
written on the palimpsest  
of the summer night.

    — Stephanie Joori Suh

  • At the Harbour, Before I Know the Story

    Reading Day — Thursday, August 13th, 2026

    On Elizabeth Taylor’s A View of the Harbour

    My first time in the harbour: at the dock, standing in the sea breeze. English air. An unfamiliar coast, oddly familiar. But this is not a book about the cozy English sea town in a postcard.

    I have read only the first few pages of the book, and it has already given me its weather and atmosphere. I feel the harbour holding the secrets of the townspeople. I feel the sea carrying the flotsam and jetsam of life quietly and bringing them into the harbour—an always moving inside a never-arrival.

    The characters I have met so far are ordinary in the sense that none of them has that fierce individualism, existential malady, or anything that instantly piques the senses. But people may find pornography in Jane Eyre: the tension, the ache, the desire. They are not spoken but felt. People keep them in the mind, as if giving a voice to the forbidden would desecrate Jane Eyre.

    I think that is what the book wants us to see: what may seem ordinary on the surface, like a calm sea, hides a storm spiraling into a pillar of fury, discordance, and disorientation. I have not yet come to know the characters, except for Prudence, whose two Siamese cats love pushing their small heads against her legs. It is the cats that draw my attention to her, but she seems to have a story to tell as a beautiful young girl who does not act like a beautiful teenage girl.

    Prudence is Prudence: Quaker in name, puritanical in action. But she may turn out to be someone different from what I have seen as I progress through the pages, although I want her to remain as I see her now. I want her to be beautiful without being popular.

    That is life, isn’t it? Change is human, an uninvited grace. You want someone you like to remain the way you know them. That is what I want to know after I complete reading the book.

    The sea will remain the same. The harbour may not.

    — Stephanie Joori Suh

  • Queen’s cats

    Share a photo of your pet and tell us one thing that makes them uniquely them.

    Camile (L) and Toro (R) on their look out from Queen’s Castle

    My cats think they are human. They like Häagen-Dazs ice cream and want to lounge in the living room with me, let alone jump on my bed when I say good night each night. Did I also mention that they’re bilingual?

    Toro in Toga channeling into an ancient Roman aristocrat

    Toro, the 6-year-old tabby, is a little tiger who wants to help me when I work from home, always insisting on typing emails and notes on my work laptop, which need my spellcheck. He takes breaks and lunch with me, so I am never alone at home. And Toro’s being human doesn’t stop there. He knows when my brother calls because he always sits next to me, his little furry body resting on my side.

    Camille’s magic eyes

    Camille, the 4-year-old black cat, is a little black panther who looks just like Gigi from Kiki’s Delivery Service. Although Camille speaks no Korean, he understands when I tell him my secret wishes and how grateful I am that he lives with me because I am lucky to live with such an adorable black cat.

    Toro as my assistant

    Whoever says cats are naturally independent and feral has not seen Toro and Camille. They are very affectionate and loving. I see their spirits in amber and emerald eyes. I feel their little hearts on my chest and at my feet.

    And they slowly blink their big eyes and bunt their little heads when I say, “I love you so much in every universe.”

  • prompt returns

    Daily writing prompt
    What’s a promise you made to yourself that you’ve actually kept?
    View all responses

    I collect promises like Swarovski jewelry, from necklaces to earrings, to bracelets, and more. I love pretty things, so I change them, but it all comes down to a few select ones that I usually wear to my heart’s liking. So are my promises. There are many, but only a few of them remain, and one of them makes it out to a World Cup final.

    I have always wanted to write a book that I can leave as my legacy, just so to prove I have lived, that I, Stephanie Joori Suh, lived, saw, and wrote. The thought that one day my body will become a speck of dust or ashes gives me a panic attack amounting to losing my eyesight completely. The ancient Greek poetess Sappho also felt the same, as found in one of her surviving fragments. Besides, there is something in me urging me to write as it is my nature. My father once told me that he had the same urge to write poetry, as his mother did too. Maybe it’s in the genes, like a family of practicing ancient secret rites.

    What I have done is to write my first chapbook of poetry this year. It is a collection of poems I wrote from my East Coast years to the present West Coast years. I auto-published a short story before as a Kindle Read, but this is my first time submitting a poetry chapbook to editors of ten presses. Some of them are for chapbook prizes, and some are regular chapbook submissions. And… one of them sent me an email last Wednesday that they wanted to publish my chapbook. I do not want to open a champagne early until I have an actual chapbook of mine in hand. Still, I feel I am in the procession of poets from the misty past and continuing as long as humanity remains.