A third book of poems by a gurlesque pioneer who continues her intimate and formally inventive exploration of gender, sex, commerce, and power.
With her third collection, Catherine Wagner assumes a mantle of responsibility. Each opportunity for productivity is a personal call-out; she responds, “diligent and strict.” A repetitive stretching exercise produces sectional meditations on obedience to self, and to ambition, and the limitations of the body as container, while the obligation to include others in one’s apprehension of the room, or self, causes Wagner’s slangy, spoken, and singing world of representation to slide from syntactic unit to unit, making room for a galaxy of metonymy. “Things mean, and I can’t tell them not to.” What’s going on inside is a watchful self-regard that invites Eros to play. Further exploration takes Wagner close into sexual fantasy—the desire for a debased object—and the politics thereof: “Well I expect you to go into the/fucking human tunnel/I’m going.” Here we find a female body marking that watching with a severe wit, charmed visuals, and the analytic prowess of a born human.
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CATHERINE WAGNER was born in Burma and grew up in Baltimore. She is the author of Macular Hole and Miss America, and co-editor of Not for Mothers Only: Contemporary Poems on Child-Getting and Child-Rearing. Recent chapbooks include Bornt, Articulate How, and Hole in the Ground. She teaches at Miami University in Oxford, OH.
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