Ideal Suggestions
Essays in Divinatory Suggestions
Selected by Kristin Prevallet for the First Essay Press Open Book Contest
Listed on Entropy‘s Best of 2017: Non-Fiction Book List
How does one participate (read and write) from within the membranous precinct between our multiple bodies, from within the larger rhizomic field of resonances, where much is sounding and also unsounded? By employing various "divinatory generators" (instructions, methods, trances), the essays in Ideal Suggestions: Essays in Divinatory Poetics genuflect to practices that celebrate engagement with uncertainty while cultivating strategies through which one might collaborate with both rupture and rapture.
REVIEWS
Selah Saterstrom’s Ideal Suggestions: Essays in Divinatory Poetics, from Essay Press, is suffused with that energy, that possibility, in both its craft and its content. The author comes from a long line of readers. Hers is a family steeped in various practices of divination, and Saterstrom’s texts are an extension of these practices. At any moment we are many selves with equally as many possible futures, presents, and pasts, and through divination — the cut of a deck, the lighting of candles, a Tarot session, the writing of a poem — we can discern and even understand these selves. —Andrew Sargus Klein, Hyperallergic
To participate in divination is to be a part of a conversation. If you are the one who asks the question, you must speak first to yourself, then with the diviner. If you are the diviner, you will have a conversation with a voice only you can hear, which answers the question possibly with advice, images, or rituals to perform to conjure a feeling. The art behind this book, and the art this book points to, is the art of conversation. This is what I learned from reading Selah Saterstrom’s Ideal Suggestions: Essays In Divinatory Poetics. —Abby Hagler, Tarpaulin Sky Magazine
Witnessing to the intimate, cryptic consistencies that exist between writer, text, and world, Selah Saterstrom makes a strong case for the reality and the agency of the written word. In Ideal Suggestions, writing is configured as a mode of living, of living-through—of holding tight as much as knowing when and how to let go. —Kylan Rice, The Carolina Quarterly
Selah Saterstrom’s far-reaching and innovative collection of essays, Ideal Suggestions: Essays in Divinatory Poetics (Essay Press, 2018), constellates relationships between reading, interpreting, writing, and the history and tradition of divination, centralizing Southern Rootwork Divination. Building a generative framework and foundation for divinatory poetics, Saterstrom prompts readers to engage with uncertainty, mystery, paradox, and the dissipating boundaries between past, present, and future. —Julia Madsen, Michigan Quarterly Review
An exquisitely printed new book from Essay Press, Selah Saterstrom’s Ideal Suggestions: Essays in Divinatory Poetics dives deep into the crosscurrents of divination, narrative, and writing. In a series of lyric essays and accompanying notes on process, Saterstrom weaves together a radical approach to literary production and reception; divining is reading is writing is reading, a call to embrace “uncertainty, simultaneity, contradiction, paradox, and parable.” —Torin Jensen, Atticus Review
Saterstom, in her collection Ideal Suggestions: Essays in Divinatory Poetics sculpts the breakthrough dynamics on divinatory poetics posing writing as a crossroad between poetry’s interpersonal chronicles and the art of prediction. —Maureen Alsop, Medium
Go read some Selah Saterstrom. —Ander Monson, Essay Daily
These essays demonstrate some tools by which one person attempts to attune herself to a voice, a space, a pain, a joy. It feels impossible to give away too much about these essays in this review. It's not that kind of book. It's a book whose entire purpose is the experience of reading it. —Weldon Ryckman, Diagram 19.3
One quickly sees in Saterstrom’s work that ‘religion,’ ‘spirituality,’ and ‘divination’ cannot be easily separated….The hermeneutics of listening that I am stressing does less to stage the poet and allows for more intimate and collaborative interaction between the listener and the writer, by attempting to find a mode of encountering the work. As the poets divine, we divine them. We are entangled with them. —Roger Green, The New Polis
The piece felt truly haunted. With terrifying imagery but beautiful words, the brother and sister discuss with calm a constantly shifting, immaterial scene of horror. … Caught up in the disturbing visions alternating between blood and mold, Saterstrom’s writing felt arresting in its attention. One could drown trying to gulp down the fast, gorgeous rhythm of her words. —Ashley Alfirevic, Colorado State University
If you’ve read Selah Saterstrom’s fiction you know it’s rapturous and visionary, hallucinations seen, cauterized and juxtaposed. In her latest book of non-fiction, Ideal Suggestions: Essays in Divinatory Poetics, Selah takes us behind the curtain on a epistemological journey of her process: writing as an act of divination that casts the writer into relationship and revelation with their work. Using meditations, pictures, vintage texts and even 80’s pop culture, Saterstrom does what she does best: collages her experience into an artifact that is fiercely individual and yet strangely universal. –Nancy Stohlman
INTERVIEW
Teresa Carmody: There’s also a lot of humor, such as in “On Writing for the Movies,” where familiar films are made strange and films I’ve never seen become strangely familiar through your exacting descriptions. So the sexism in Revenge of the Nerds, for example, becomes socially absurd, which is a kind of transmutation. Or here is another line from an earlier essay: “telling the story of a ghost then admitting you are the suffer-fucked ghost.” Can you talk about the relationship between suffering and humor in the book?
Selah Saterstrom: Lamentation and celebration are linked for me (the internal imprint of the Mardi Gras). The ritual importance of the carnival probably best lays out the relationship between humor and suffering as I have experienced it.
I took a rather deadpan approach to writing the film version of Revenge of the Nerds (writing from memory and photos). I was surprised when I felt like the writing did this unexpected thing of revealing sexism in a blatant way. Sometimes in a terrifying way.
The straightforward approach – guided by the dissonance that shoots through memory – turned the humor of the trope inside out. It reminded me of when I was a kid and my cousin Metah and I would listen to “Another One Bites the Dust” backwards on her Sesame Street record player, over and over again. I’ve always loved that weirdness when the narrative is rattled and all the bees come out.
PRAISE
Written over the course of sixteen years, Selah Saterstrom’s Ideal Suggestions: Essays in Divinatory Poetics is a celebration of what C.D. Wright called storytelling’s capability to “translate the world back into tongues.” Juxtaposing lyric essays and fragments with meditations on process, Saterstrom alchemizes minerals, prayers, screenplays, slaughterhouses, spiders, and sexual encounters. The result is an amulet disguised as a book that’s at once generous, rhizomatic, haunted, formally rangy, musical, and assured. —Claire Donato
In this remarkable book Selah Saterstrom, heir to a long line of divinatory women, invites us to the crossroads between writing and divination, or, reading. Whether she reads the cards, the rosary, a film, or a painting, her divinatory process is always a deep listening, through which she opens herself to “risk and disorientation.” The writing that results runs fluidly, freely, fearlessly through losses, terrors, mysteries, and passions. Saterstrom guides us, her readers, into her practices in order to unveil, and make available to us, writing as a celebratory and prayerful act, as ecstatic song. To read this book is to understand anew the exuberant possibilities of the word. —Julie Carr
I don’t know if poetry is prayer, but I do know that Selah Saterstrom has offered a divine answer to the deadening thrum of heteropatriarchal capitalistic poetry in Ideal Suggestions: Essays in Divinatory Poetics. These essays span the range of rhetorical modes while illuminating a regular practice of reaching toward (indeed celebrating, embodying) mystery. A line from Alice Walker’s The Color Purple kept repeating as I read this book: “They come to church to share God, not find God.” I never thought I’d say I want to go to church with someone, but I think I’ve just gone with Saterstrom and dammit all, it just might be saving me. —TC Tolbert
Excerpt
Opening Note ~ In 1893 Henry C. Wood published one of the first self-help books, IDEAL SUGGESTIONS THROUGH MENTAL PHOTOGRAPHY. Mr. Wood's theory, coinciding with the advent of photography in popular culture, maintained that one's brain could photograph positive affirmations or "Ideal Suggestions." The "solar light" of the camera corrected the "lunar imbalance" of the lunatic or otherwise morally flawed individual. In many asylums it was popular to dress the committed in fancy attire and take their portrait. After, the photographed individual would view their evolved "moral version" as part of their correctional therapy…. —Post Road, Issue 25, “Divinatory Experiment”