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“Emerson, calling for a true American poet, said that language is a fossil record of poetry: every word was once a poem. If poetry is, therefore, some kind of life-animal, then Catherine Wagner's Miss America is a glorious beast. Her first book is cocksure and wailing, stinky, rude, and actually happening. Miss America is not self-thrilled by its (her?) own intentions and inventions, but running fast ahead of them. We have here the strangely visceral truths that fall from children's mistranslations, something undeniable slipped from the angry, drunk, or otherwise possessed. Wagner warns us of herself (and her propensity to invent words) right from the start. The opening poem of the book begins: ‘nigh said I made that up to / get some sweeteye from you all / some glance at me even if my / story is boring and a lie / . . . and who fuckin cares they don't / want me to be likem and borem / everybody dead. / Since I been here SCARED / and my natural EBULLISHNESS / held back by a warning finger. / Mo lady! Poop it out!’ …
…Anyone who thinks this is babytalk should remember how we react when encountering a talking baby: fascinated and mesmerized. The further these nascent communications seem to be from ‘language,’ the closer they feel to an emotional core. Wagner's tongues, however, are never an escape from meaning. As she tells us in ‘Poem for Poets & Writers,’ ‘I like understanding so much I want it to happen over and over.’ Wagner is not just playing with the readymade materials of poetry, she is working from inner fiat: ‘Not here with joy but under pressure / from my superego’ (‘A Poem for Art in America,’ one of her ‘Magazine Poems’).
Wagner dives more into the skin than the conscious mind to find her way. These poems are raw, pre-lapsarian in their instinctual connections (not to mention their naked and naughty refusal of sin); they feel more than our language usually allows us.”—Rob Strong , Provincetown Arts Magazine
Catherine Wagner’s Miss America makes poetry of contemporary erudition and confession out of a new sort of baroque plain speech. Wagner’s roving eye and ear take into consideration all the offerings of our world- magazines, breakfast, ghosts- and find brilliant encryptions of human physical reality in perfect words. Nothing is too far away or too close to warrant reaction: Good Housekeeping, Edmund Spenser, mayonnaise, boobs, death; all compose Wagner’s vernacular of music and knowledge, a kind of thinking out loud that translates into a witty, vertiginous awareness.
Endorsements:
“The poems of Catherine Wagner are instantly sacramental, immediately mysterious. Showing songlines to Spicer’s profanity and to Zukofsky’s purest register, they move through musics entirely their own. There, Miss America finds a broken world wide-open but unharmed. There, Wagner proves the wisdom of divided hearts. She is a mage and marvel. I believe she is our best.”—Donald Revell
“Jack Spicer’s Martians are back, but now they’re talking wild girl-talk. In Catherine Wagner’s Miss America, public and private collide in a new way, like matter and anti-matter. This is a conflagration. ‘That is damage talk,’ she says, ‘Want to watch me/ Make it.’ And I do. In fact, if I died, I might want to come back as Catherine Wagner.”—Rae Armantrout
From the Book:
A Poem for Guideposts
I made a pie of light
Sat me down in front
The glaze sucked all the blue out of the air
I was a pilot search
Went intrinsically backward
The moss of my feet booked me in
Moss and wet cloud
I held my spine up natural head natural like a top spins
Will God deny me anything
God will eat a piece of the world
Piece of gone
There was a streaming wedge but it was not a piece it was
The whole boat
It was carried
Our shoulders dirt our shoulders smell like come
Swerve round this round that balancedly
The one plate and the other at varying levels till the table comes
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