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

Tag: Poetry

  • Saturday, October 17th, 2026 – Reading of Yiyun Li’s “‘Infinite Genius’: On Anne Carson,” published in The Guardian

    When I read Anne Carson’s Glass, Irony & God, I felt as though I were reading riddles in prose poetry, imagining the Pythia speaking Apollo’s words from her tripod at Delphi. It is strange in its arrangement of simple language, beautiful in its narrative of her inner world—a maze where she lets readers or listeners find her. Guy Davenport’s introduction summed up this collection: she wrote philosophy as poetry in language accessible to the layperson, with a poet’s eye, speaking to general readers, not a select few.

    Reading Li’s article on Carson becoming a Nobel laureate in literature this year confirmed my appreciation of the rare beauty of Carson’s poetry. I knew Carson was different from poets of our time because her poems were personal yet relatable, with themes ranging from her elderly mother to her former lover and her experiences in Italy. Li’s admiration for Carson’s literary world comes from Carson’s alchemy of words, which Carson conjures as her fingers move across a blank page. She has no grimoire for poetry, but she possesses the poetic mania that Plato regarded as sacred. Words will come when you write. Let the spirit move your hand.

    Although Li’s essay grows from her grief over the loss of her two sons and her reading of Carson’s Grief Lessons, which I have not yet read, her praise seems to idolize Carson’s work, contrary to Carson’s intentional use of plain language to reach the hearts of general readers. Moreover, Li’s effusive lionization of Carson’s work makes it seem to belong only to Li. Carson writes of love, of life, and of herself through the mind of a poet singing in plain English. She is something of a Socrates, who brought philosophy from heaven to the world by knocking on people’s doors to speak of the love of wisdom.

    I believe what is good for the mind—and ultimately the body, as the Romans said, mens sana in corpore sano, “a sound mind in a sound body”—should be shared. Carson’s status as a Nobel laureate should not distance her work from general readers by placing it among the untouchable literati. Carson invites readers into her maze and gives them language as a ball of thread, leading them toward the riveting light of her enchanting mind. I believe this is what Carson wants.

  • 2027 Pushcart Prize Nomination

    I am delighted to share that my poem “The Last Light of October” has been nominated for the 2027 Pushcart Prize by Belladonna’s Garden.

    My heartfelt thanks to Editor-in-Chief Shari Wilder for this honor.

    Announcement image courtesy of https://www.belladonnasgardenlit.com/issues/winter-2026-issue-2/stephanie-suh

  • Reading Book II of the Aeneid by Virgil

    Thursday, September 10, 2026

    I often wonder why God allows the ills of society to persist and their victims to suffer violence for no reason. What are the sins of children who suffer such violence? Why can’t he care more about changing the fates of these children? The same question arises through Aeneas in Book II when he sees his beloved Troy burning and, with a yearning heart, seems to demand an answer. If fate requires suffering, what is fate? Is God truly omnipotent and omniscient?

    Book II is Aeneas’s ballad of burning Troy—the story of his fate, which does not allow him to enjoy the ordinary life of a married man. His life doesn’t seem to be protected by the gods, even by his divine mother, who appears to her son as Venus, not as a mother. They force him to fulfill sacred pietas by carrying Troy’s future to foreign soil, where his descendants will build Rome. He tries to resist their gambit on the chessboard, where he is their number-one knight, moved around at their pleasure. Even his mother Venus is part of the divine ilk and hurries him out of Troy like a mom sending her son to school before it’s too late. In Aeneas’s mortal eyes, the idea of becoming the forefather of Rome appeals to him less than being a husband, a father, and a son at home. Can even his divine mother protect him from this fate?

    Gods are cruel just as God is cruel. They make his life easy only when he acts according to their will. Without the gods’ command, Aeneas would not have thought of fleeing the burning city with his elderly father Anchises on his back, his little son Ascanius at his right hand, and his wife Creusa following behind. But then Creusa must stay away from her husband, who has a duty far greater than his personal life. Her ghost appears and tells Aeneas that he must leave; as she vanishes into the folds of mist, all his chances of escaping his fate and its burdens vanish with her. He has no reason to stay but must move forward against his will.

    The Trojan Horse, Laocoön and his two sons engulfed by the sea serpents, and the cries of Priam and his wife Hecuba all signify the great labor of birth in the process of dying, all within the fate of a man who must act out his assigned role in the divine chess game.

  • Sunday Letter – 2

    Sunday, September 6th, 2026

    Hi Freddo,

    It’s September, and fall will arrive soon. In fact, the cooler temperatures are already its harbingers, and I am all for it. How’s the weather in Rome? And how are your projects coming along? Last time I heard, you were working on a translation of a certain book from English into Italian. Are you still working on it? Can you tell me what the book is about?

    I want to show you my prose poem I wrote yesterday. It’s one of my recent experiments with story-like poems. I write poems that read like prose. The best thing about prose poems is that there is no complication of characters with existential dilemmas and metaphysical questions about who they are—questions that not many people care about. But these days, too many poems and stories can read like ideological catalogs, social agendas, or personal traumas that are not easy to read and take to heart. While I get that shared traumatic experiences may help those who find themselves therein, that is not my cup of tea. I don’t want to write about my ethnicity or race in the context of living in America as an Asian immigrant woman. I don’t want to be labeled as an “ethnic” woman writer whose work is shelved outside of the so-called mainstream book sections in bookstores. That is why I admire someone such as Kazuo Ishiguro, who wrote The Remains of the Day. His background does not prescribe the consciousness, subject, or voice he is permitted to inhabit; you would not necessarily know that a Japanese-British man wrote it in posh British English. There are no boundaries of race, gender, or age in the language of the mind and heart. You can be whoever you want to be and show the world the way you are.

    Today’s letter reads like a rant from an anxious woman irritated by a boisterous party of popular or best-selling writers. So be it. I do not want to be restrained in the realm of written words where I can be myself. I do not like being boxed in by what people expect me to be and write, because that is not who I am. You would find it a bit hard to relate to my literary zeal to write the truth about myself because you would not feel the pressure of ink in your own color, but that is okay. I do not expect you to understand my stance. However, I would be incredibly happy to see you on my side when people scoff at my poems and prose.

    Dreaming of a dusk on the Aventino Hill looking over Rome with you,

    Stefania

  • The Aeneid — Book I Reading Note

    Version 1.0.0

    Book I begins in the middle of Aeneas’s journey to his fated destination of Italy. Virgil seems to sympathize with the man who surrenders his personal feelings to the public duty of building a new Troy, as arranged by the Fates. Gods can interfere but cannot change his fate. It’s a case of Thus Spoke Zarathustra—but who is Zarathustra here? Aeneas, or Virgil speaking through him?

    If it’s Aeneas who speaks, then he does so through Virgil as his advocate for the glory of fulfilling pietas with gravitas. Cupid is not for him, but for Dido, who became enamored with a man whose vulnerability was braided with virility, clothed in beauty. Then Juno’s absurdly violent rage against the Trojan general, who laments his fate, forces him to wander across the seas through the vicissitudes of gain and loss, loss and gain. But that doesn’t mean Aeneas is a man of steel, because when Venus appears to him in disguise as a wanderer, he rebukes her for behaving like an immortal rather than a mother, even when she is trying to help her son.

    Book I presents Aeneas as a man who agonizes over the conflict between his desire and pietas, born of a mortal father and an immortal mother. It is the dual nature of man: physical and spiritual. This could later be applied to the Christian teaching that the will is strong, but the flesh is weak. In Virgil’s view—his imagination still cloaked in the Republican toga, albeit under Emperor Augustus—Aeneas was the model Roman man and soldier who placed honor and valor before beauty and love. He was Virgil’s kind of man, one who would build the grandeur of Rome.

    Book I ends with a scene in which Dido, the queen of Carthage—Juno’s beloved land—is infatuated with Aeneas after Cupid sprinkles powdered amour upon her. This is Venus’s machination to secure protection and refuge for Aeneas and the Trojans. Would this be a plot of Fate too? Then, does it mean that Venus is also a gambit in Fate’s chess? Then, what is the meaning of living a life in the mirage of hope?

  • 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