Screen Memories Receives a Beautiful Review in London Grip

Written By Geoffrey Gatza

We are delighted to share that Henry Sussman’s Screen Memories has just been reviewed in London Grip, and what a thoughtful, generous reading it is.

In “SCREEN MEMORIES: Charles Rammelkamp considers Henry Sussman’s poetic account of his lifelong love of cinema,” critic Charles Rammelkamp enters deeply into the project of this remarkable book. His review recognizes something essential about Screen Memories: this is not simply a collection of poems about film. It is a life lived in conversation with cinema.

Published by BlazeVOX [books] in 2025, Screen Memories unfolds as a sustained poetic meditation, ten interwoven sections and a prologue that move fluidly between autobiography, film theory, cultural memory, and lyric reflection. Rammelkamp perceptively notes how the book’s shifting typography and visual architecture mirror the rhythms of recollection itself. The page becomes a screen; the poem becomes montage.

What makes this review especially gratifying is the way Rammelkamp traces Sussman’s cinematic lineage. From Ingmar Bergman’s psychological intensity to Federico Fellini’s dreamlike theatricality, from Akira Kurosawa’s moral complexity to the modernist provocations of Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, the review acknowledges how these filmmakers become more than influences, they become companions in Sussman’s unfolding intellectual and emotional life.

Rammelkamp also highlights one of the book’s most powerful gestures: its refusal to treat cinema as mere nostalgia. Instead, film becomes a way of thinking through illness, love, grief, and the shifting self. The movies that flicker across these pages are not cultural artifacts alone, they are part of lived experience, braided into memory and identity.

We are deeply grateful to London Grip for giving this work such close and careful attention. Independent poetry thrives on conversations like this, where a reviewer truly inhabits the book and brings readers inside its architecture.

If you haven’t yet encountered Screen Memories, this review is a wonderful place to begin. And if you already know Henry Sussman’s work, Rammelkamp’s essay offers a rich new lens through which to see it.

We encourage you to read the full review at London Grip and celebrate with us this beautiful recognition of a book that reminds us how art, whether projected on a screen or printed on a page, becomes part of who we are.

Hurray indeed.


Read the full review here:
https://londongrip.co.uk/2026/02/london-grip-poetry-review-henry-sussman/

Buy Screen Memories by Henry Sussman
https://www.blazevox.org/shop-1/p/screen-memories-by-henry-sussman



Geoffrey Gatza

Bio Note: Geoffrey Gatza is the author of the poetry collections The House of Forgetting (2012), Apollo: A Conceptual Poem (2014), and A Dog Lost in the Brick City of Outlawed Trees (2018).

 

Divya Victor, in an article for poetryfoundation.org, said of Apollo: A Conceptual Poem “The diversity of these works echoes the complexities of the subject, but together they posit something specific, the heightened relationship between the interior self and the exterior world.”

 

Gatza’s poems have been published in anthologies, as well as magazines and journals including Fence, Tarpaulin Sky, The Pickled Body, Peach Mag, Tupelo Quarterly and various others. His play on Marcel Duchamp was staged in an art installation in Philadelphia and performed in NYC.

 

Gatza is an award-winning editor, publisher and poet. He is the driving force behind BlazeVOX, an independent press located in Buffalo, NY, specializing in innovative fictions and wide ranging fields of contemporary poetry. Geoffrey Gatza is lives in Kenmore, NY.

editor@blazevox.org

http://www.blazevox.org

http://www.blazevox.org
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