‘Sue Burge’s skylark shout of yes yes yes to Paris is no mere tourist crush. All honesty, by way of the Nouvelle Vague, couch-surfing, Oulipo, and the bouquinistes, Burge examines her long-term flawed affair with the City of Light, unravelling its urban celluloid distortions like a shifty-eyed Seine siren, leaving wet lipstick kisses all over town. We can't help but want to follow her trail.’
Lisa Pasold

‘Here are the many recipes for Paris, that ‘fickle madame blowing lipstick in your eyes’. In this collection, its bread, calentica and every one of its clichés are made new by lifelong visitor, Sue Burge. Her poems entice with their range and invention as she explores the city, its characters, history and her place in it. There’s Thanksgiving dinner at Gertrude Stein’s, Kurt Cobain at Père Lachaise, Sacré Coeur gleaming like salt in moonlight, and absinthe that looks like liquid peridot and curiously tastes like childhood. Burge may style herself ‘The Artificial Parisienne’, but her Paris will never be a cardigan.’
Kate Noakes

In this startling new collection, Sue Burge explores both the Paris of the alter ego she left there over thirty years ago, and her edgy current relationship with Paris, in poems which are an intense psycho-geographic evocation of the city of her obsessive dreams.