My face is a case studyin gravity. A face study. A grave.Effaced, I introduce myselfby name, a quippydelegate, ceci Susan,this lifelong stand-in.Named after my motheror rather, the pseudonym that hidher foreign origin. Shoushik.She’d take her breakfaston the balcony. Tehran1943. Feeding the antsand plants her onion-tisanemilk. My little mother.From her ovariescame I. An alloy.Reproduction reproducesinexactly, doesn’t it?Soldering like to unlike,an off-rhyme, like meand time, the clock ticks.Those aren’t notes but holesthat make the music.
Player Piano
Susan Barba
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First published in the January 16th, 2025 issue of The New York Review of Books.
Susan Barba is the author of two poetry collections, Fair Sun and geode, which was a finalist for the New England Book Awards and the Massachusetts Book Awards. She is a co-editor, with Victoria Rowe, of I Want to Live: Poems of Shushanik Kurghinian, and the editor of American Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide, which won the 2023 American Horticultural Society Book Award. Her poems and prose have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, Poetry, The New Republic, PN Review, and elsewhere. She earned her doctorate in comparative literature from Harvard University, and she has received fellowships from MacDowell and Yaddo. She works as a senior editor for New York Review Books.
January 16, 2025
New York, New York
Editor
Emily Greenhouse
Deputy Editor
Michael Shae
Executive Editor
Jana Prikryl
The New York Review of Books has established itself, in Esquire’s words, as “the premier literary-intellectual magazine in the English language.” The New York Review began during the New York publishing strike of 1963, when its founding editors, Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein, and their friends, decided to create a new kind of magazine—one in which the most interesting and qualified minds of our time would discuss current books and issues in depth. Just as importantly, it was determined that the Review should be an independent publication; it began life as an independent editorial voice and it remains independent today.
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