Shelf Life
The University of Arizona Poetry Center recently acquired its 60,000th book, Rescuing Q: Quandaries and Queries by book artist Suzanne Moore. 60,000! That’s a lot of books in one little building.
Photos by Rhaya Truman
Earlier this month, the University of Arizona Poetry Center celebrated the accession of its 60,000th book by welcoming the public for carrot cake and lemonade. 60,000! That’s a lot of books in one little building. The work in question is called Rescuing Q: Quandaries and Queries by the artist Suzanne Moore. Across 32 illustrated, embossed, debossed, collaged, painted and otherwise elaborately constructed pages, Moore poses a series of questions and meditations sourced from friends and members of her community. Questions like, “Can a mirror keep a secret?” and “What’s so amazing that keeps us stargazing / and what do we think we will see?” And so on, and so forth.
But wait — an artist’s book? Is that even poetry? (Good question.) “For one thing, the questions are really unusual,” says Poetry Center Library Director Sarah Kortemeier. “For another, the language is really spare and really concise. And it’s all in this question form. It’s this formal constraint of the question. And then there’s a ton of white space on the page, so all that put together adds up to a really poetic effect. In my brain, anyway.”
Makes sense. And anyway, in times of uncertain footing and ever-billowing clouds of information that seem to dissipate under the slightest breath of scrutiny, what could be more powerful — and poetic — than standing in the light of what we don’t know? As the German author Rainer Maria Rilke said, “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.” That’s poetry.
And to think that there’s a place right here on campus with 59,999 other tools with which to pose, query, interrogate, engage and otherwise make meaning inside of us, and you can walk right in during business hours and browse them for free — a remarkable gift to the community, still giving more than 60 years after its founding. Did we mention Suzanne is a local? Moved to Tucson a few years ago. Some of the printing for Rescuing Q was done with Sandy Tilcock at lone goose press in Bisbee, and the paper used was from Cave Paper, just north of downtown Tucson. “It’s the product of an ecosystem of artists working in southern Arizona,” Kortemeier says, “and so special for that reason, too.”
So, book No. 60,000. For the trainspotters and treasure hunters, what’s No. 1? “There is a book that has the number one, and I have not found it yet,” Kortemeier says. “When I do find it, I’m going to be very excited.” Let the questions bloom.
Learn More About The People In This Story
Suzanne Moore, Author
Suzanne Moore
Suzanne Moore was born to a family of gifted inventor-engineers, and raised in post-Sputnik middle America, with aptitudes in math and science. She was channeled into those fields at an early age, leaping blindly, but happily to art with the encouragement of a generous and insightful professor. She layers painting, lettering, printmaking, and drawing to create contemporary manuscript books and limited edition books.
Her work is shown widely, and it is collected privately and by institutions such as Wellesley College, the Library of Congress, Harvard, Yale, Princeton and the University of Washington, among others. Suzanne teaches about contemporary manuscript design, conceptual book design and on painting and collage techniques, in North America and abroad, and speaks about her work.
Sarah Koretemeier, U of A Poetry Center Library Director
University of Arizona Poetry Center
Sarah Kortemeier oversees the Poetry Center Library, directing Library policy, programs, budgeting, and collection development. She also oversees the library's University educational outreach.
Sarah holds an MFA in Poetry and an MA in Library and Information Science, both from The University of Arizona. She is the author of Ganbatte (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019) and the digital chapbook A ri ot Poetics: Erasures (The Offending Adam, 2022). Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly Review, Sentence, Pilgrimage, Fairy Tale Review, The Feminist Wire, Barrow Street, and Spiral Orb, among others.