Master Suffering: Poems

CM Burroughs’s Master Suffering is transcendent… a book-length conjuring to counter grief’s entropy. It is a pulsing utterance providing solace in the dark.

–Simone Muench

A striking, brave, and stunning book. I love Burroughs’s poems and I love Master Suffering. It’s not easy to make poems like these, and they are important. –Sean Singer

Master Suffering: a directive? Or a direct address? CM Burroughs throws us off-balance before we’ve opened the cover of her dynamic new collection, and continues to blow us away, moving us further and more deeply with each turn of the page.

–Evie Shockley

The poems of Master Suffering pendulate between yield and command; the bodies of this book are supplicant yet seething–they want nothing more than to survive. But how does a woman survive? One’s own healthy body helps, but illness is one of the masters of this book. Faith can be a salve for the inscrutable ailments of the body, but God is unreliable in these poems. The female bodies of Master Suffering want power; power to control and to correct the suffering they both witness and withstand.