Glass “I”s: A Brief Anatomy—Suzanne Buffam on the Craft of Poetry

All literary “I”s are made of glass. No matter how naturalistic they appear—how convincing they may be to the naked eye, that is—they are as synthetic as Colombo’s right eye. With brief digressions into ophthalmologic curiosities, this talk will be an illustrated anatomy of three varieties of literary “I”s.

Suzanne Buffam was born and raised in Montreal, Canada. She's the author of three collections of poetry, A Pillow Book (Canarium Books 2016), The Irrationalist (Canarium Books, 2010), which was shortlisted for the 2011 Griffin Poetry Prize, and Past Imperfect (House of Anansi Press, 2005), which won the Gerald Lampert Award. Her poems have also been published in Poetry, jubilat, A Public Space, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, Prairie Schooner, and many other journals. She lives in Chicago.