"The Carnivorous Gaze" takes its meaning from the lean and hungry Cassius, who thinks too much. Anthropologist, poet, and artist, Sue Parman is a hunger artist who devours obscure words in the Oxford English Dictionary, chomps on life and love with sharp teeth, seasons death and illness with bitter wit and sweet irony, and whips up dense poetic forms and turns them airy with a playful interaction of words and art."Thorny, witty, braided and woven and webbed, startling; dark and sweet and sad and funny; lines and passages that will haunt you for days; and behind it all a wry sharp intelligence and large open bruised heart," says Brian Doyle, author of Mink River.Parman's book is "...a marvelous romp through anthropology, philosophy, history, and language by a poet who knows the rules and breaks them. There's music and story here, form that is played with, hopped over and stepped around, poems of humor and wit, and poems that deal honestly and imaginatively with the most momentous of life's events-death, illnesses, and found and lost loves. As a poet, Parman is crafting a personal mythology fit for a new world," according to Barbara La Morticella, author of Even the Hills Move in Waves."Sue Parman's poems are a fabulous mix of the formal and the miraculous. She uncovers what is beneath ground and is dazzled by what exists in the light. She tenders reality-relationships, work, time, love-with a direct style that is scaffolded by complex forms and complex ideas. 'The Carnivorous Gaze' comes to see everything in human experience with a rapacious affection for life," comments David Biespiel, author of The Book of Men and Women.
A former Professor of Anthropology, Sue Parman is the author of six books and numerous articles on topics as diverse as Scottish crofters, Japan, the European Union, the neurophysiology and cultural patterning of dreams, the relationship of salt preferences to diet, and history of ideas. Over a period of thirty years she served as Department Head, Chairman of the Board and Vice President of the Human Relations Area Files at Yale University, and Fellow of the Society of Antiquarians of Scotland, and was awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Science Foundation, including a million-dollar grant to construct a new anthropology research and teaching facility (see http: //anthro.fullerton.edu/sparman). In addition to her academic writings, she has published in diverse literary genres, from memoirs, science fiction, and travel writing to sonnets and haiku (see www.sueparman.com). Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Fault Line, Cloudbank, Verseweavers, Slant, The Hiram Poetry Review, The Elephant-Ear, The Blue Mouse, and the Humanistic Mathematics Network Journal, and a chapbook The Thin Monster House was published by Finishing Line Press in 2012. Her short stories, plays, and essays have appeared in VoiceCatcher, Lumina, Journeys, The Elephant-Ear, The Los Angeles Times, and Songs of Innocence. Produced plays include "The House of Ravens," "North of Sixty-Three Degrees," "The Red Tide," and "Queen Victoria's Secret." She is the recipient of awards from the Willamette Writers, Oregon Writers Colony, Best Travel Writing Annual Solas Awards, Oregon Humanities, and the Oregon Poetry Association. In Oregon since 2009, she hikes forested trails, stalks Powell's labyrinthine bookstore, and enjoys a sane public transportation system. She is currently a member of the Authors Guild, Oregon Poetry Association, Willamette Writers, Oregon Society of Artists, Watercolor Society of Oregon, and is on the Executive Board of the Oregon Writers Colony. She enjoys giving public talks on poetry as a form of serious play rooted in our biological nature as large-brained mammals.
