Review of The Damage Done
by Susana H. Case

Reviewed by Erica Goss

It was the Age of Aquarius—the glory days of the countercultural 1960s and 70s, a time of experimentation, starry-eyed optimism, and never-ending protests against the Vietnam War. As the hopeful lyric from “Aquarius,” the opening song of the musical Hair, declared, “Peace will guide the planets and love will steer the stars.”

But a malevolent force lurked beneath that shimmering surface. Its goal was to undermine and ultimately destroy the peace-and-love movement, as well as any and all efforts threatening the status quo. COINTELPRO, the FBI’s covert operation, infiltrated groups such as the Black Panthers, the Anti-War Movement, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), tapping phones, reading mail, and sowing paranoia and mistrust throughout their memberships.

Susana H. Case’s tightly focused poetry collection, The Damage Done, delves into this time in history. A novel-in-verse based on true events, the book is a thriller that’s all too relevant, weaving a tale of undercover spies and the hapless humans caught in their webs. Through the character of Janey, an anorexic fashion model “skinny with a single name” like the super-slim, teenaged Londoner Twiggy, Case explores a netherworld where danger, drugs, and sex entangle Janey, her husband, her Black Panther boyfriend, and the detective investigating her murder.

The book leaps back and forth in time, grounding and foreshadowing its plot. In “10. Flashback: Family of Origin, Family of Choice,” Janey and her boyfriend are “running guns to Newark” when they stop “to make out.” Clearly, the danger of gun-running is part of the attraction; Janey is rebelling against a “stern family,” which includes a mother who “made her kiss / Grandfather’s corpse…/ She was eleven.”

Janey’s death is a conundrum for the police. Case captures the voice and vernacular of these men—“how they hated that interracial shit”—whose words reveal their own insecurities. From “8. Secret Life:” “A cop notes / the stiff’s on the Security Index, // Priority 3, the Feds’ list—potential / pinko, free-love hippie.” From these lines, we learn that the FBI had Janey under surveillance, a detail that leads to the ruminations in “15. The Lover in Mourning,” who “fears / he will be set up for her murder.”

As the book progresses, Case heightens the atmosphere of suspicion that permeates these poems. Everyone is a potential enemy, armed to the teeth and ready to shoot. The lines “A postcard drawing of the cross hairs / of a rifle, Traitors Beware / sits in your mailbox” open “33. Flashback: Cross Hairs on the Back of Your Neck.” The creeping sense of paranoia isn’t just the product of an over-active imagination, it’s the result of living in a culture where no one can be trusted.

The Damage Done contains a very useful section of notes, which provides historical context for the poems. These notes confirm the discomfort so many experienced during the 1960s and 70s: that nagging feeling that things weren’t quite right.

As Joseph Heller wrote in Catch-22, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.”

 

Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 25, Issue 5.

 
Erica Goss is the winner of the 2019 Zocalo Poetry Prize. Her collection, Night Court, won the 2017 Lyrebird Award from Glass Lyre Press. She is the founder of Girls’ Voices Matter, a filmmaking workshop for teen girls. Erica served as Poet Laureate of Los Gatos, CA, from 2013-2016. Erica is the editor of the newsletter Sticks & Stones. www.mediapoetrystudio.com. www.ericagoss.com.