"Susannah Nevison's Lethal Theater is a powerful, nuanced accounting of the physical and spiritual price violence exacts on its victims and perpetrators. This stunning lyric meditation on imprisonment relentlessly pushes the limits of mercy in asking us to bear witness to the ways in which we inflict pain on others in places where "the dark touches / everything, spreading its wound." --Erika Meitner

"Susannah Nevison's Lethal Theater is a testament to the moral imagination. Many times, the speakers of these poems seem perched at the edge of the kind of all-consuming empathetic seeing that defeats witness, but they never fall over. And what they, and Nevison, see most clearly is that we are to be known and measured by the ways we treat those over whom we have power, and yet most often we do not want to know the power we have over others, nor what is done to others in our name. Lethal Theater speaks our name." --Shane McCrae

"Susannah Nevison's searing second collection, Lethal Theater, is not about how we die but how we kill, protected by procedure, faith in duty, cruel appetite, and the State. Nevison steadfastly rejects dulled indifference; instead, her poems--lyric, found, urgent--pulse with sound anger, grief, and complicity's persistent ache." --Douglas Kearney