Reviews
I
Never Did Tell You Did I?
(Unsent Letters)
by Susan Smith Nash
It's a pleasure to read someone who has opinions
about almost everything, from Uzbekistan to Mad Cow Disease--from the
large to the small to the microscopic. Susan Smith Nash, whose honest
and benevolent gaze is democratic and inclusive, is a funny, invincible
letter-writer. In
these
Unsent
Letters,
we are
reminded of how vision and "re"-vision are a living process
inspired by hope but purely grounded in wisdom.
—Maxine Chernoff
In Unsent Letters Nash chooses the nearly abandoned genre of the epistle to dismantle "reality," to reach inside the illusion of narrative & extract what really matters in an increasingly desperate world. "What is love in the 21st century in the age of the internet ?" In the intimacy of these letters, the self speaks to self, exposing the ruptures of story & masquerade of our so-called American dream.
—John High
Susan Smith Nash knows that psychology and politics are inseparable, and that our own individual histories are caught up in the history of the world. The letters that comprise I Never Did Tell You, Did I? are much wilder than you're prepared for, but only because the power of their insights is so searing and necessary, ultimately sane. Artaud once wrote that "Things are going badly because sick consciousness has a vested interest right now in not recovering from its sickness." Susan Smith Nash wants not only to show us that sickness but to show us our own vested interest in it.
—Mark Wallace
She's traveling frequently, writing (long) letters almost daily. With an air of being just a woman from Oklahoma, doing many chores, not even restless, looking for a job…she disorients you, and you find yourself into her labyrinth (meeting also many Central Asians), and beware: you have been led by a prose close to a somnambulistic music that blends together little events that come off like sparks soon to die in Time's flow. Susan Smith Nash has created a personae whose geography comprises neither valleys nor mountains, but a river cluttered with daily life. She's writing to you, as her letters are never mailed. For your effort you get salami for $1.50, pepperoni for $4.00, and a mirror of your own look-alike existence. I buy it.
—Etel Adnan