Psychic Lectures

At once lyric sequence, portable oracle, and opportunity for reflection, Psychic Lectures invites the ancient practice of opening a book in search of an answer while never allowing a single answer the final word. Its pleasures are both comic and uncanny: a comedy of shifting identities, an inquiry into belief, and an exploration of how language creates the selves it appears only to describe.

No two pages agree on who you are. Open the book anywhere and it offers another possibility. Read straight through, they accumulate into something far stranger: a chorus of incompatible selves, each insisting on its own authority.

Identity appears as a series of signs rather than a stable condition. Every page tells the reader who they are with confidence. What begins as a succession of fortunes becomes something stranger: repetition thickens into pattern, pattern into belief, until contradiction itself begins to feel revelatory.

Following their Lambda Literary Award–winning debut The Nerves, Lee Suksi has written a work of uncommon lightness and precision. Psychic Lectures is a book to revisit rather than finish, one that changes with circumstance, mood, and chance, offering each reading as a new arrangement of possibility.

Lee Suksi is the author of The Nerves (Metatron), winner of a Lambda Literary Award. They have also made a book of drawings, Acting On You (fine.press). Their writing appears in Public Parking, The Capilano Review, The Brooklyn Review, and many other literary journals. They live in Toronto, where they write a horoscope column for The Grind.

Praise for Lee Suksi’s The Nerves

“Freaky, sweet, and incredibly sexy, the intimacy of this book feels like sharing a perfume with your new lover, syncing periods, and then remembering with horror that love is a state of anxiety. These poems stir up trouble in a state of ecstasy that ‘sugar, drugs, and waterfalls‘ come close to conjuring. The Nerves is a pillow to hold as you fall asleep dreaming of past or future lovers, it’s that gentle dizzy feeling: crush, crush, crush, crush.”–Rachel Rabbit White, author of Porn Carnival

“A cyclical and microscopic search for intimacy that leads back to one’s warm touch.”—Sook Yin Lee

“In The Nerves, there are portraits, and self-portraits, and big hearts moving through rooms. There are bodies tumbling, squeezing, yelling, holding; there is seduction and vulnerability and, most of all, trust. Suksi’s sentences crackle with the pleasure of their own description, each line recreating itself more tenderly and erotically than the one before.”—Jacquelyn Zong-Li Ross, author of The Longest Way to Eat a Melon