Winner of the 2007 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize Selected by John Yau $14.00 Paper, 978-0-9754990-7-8 2008 • 80 pp. 5 1/2 x 7 1/2" •Reviews• •Excerpt• •About the Author•
Reviews:
“Catherine Pierce gets to the conundrum of language; we want to believe what it says and we don’t believe it. She understands our need to tell tall stories, to exaggerate and embellish, to become figures that we are not, but wish to be. Her empathy for the abject in us is always riddled with humor, self-mocking, sharp, and, at times, painful. Recognizing that words can be both a solace and an accuser, Pierce walks that tightrope with grace.”
— John Yau, judge
"With a marvelously open-hearted candor, Catherine Pierce troubles both the past and future — the homelands of her lyric art — as much as she summons them into life. ‘Be kind to old photographs,’ one poem tells us, ‘but not overly kind.’ Where other poets are flip, she’s seriously playful; where other poets are timid, she’s determined to engage the particulars behind which experience hides. Even more remarkably, the poems in this collection somehow manage to sing the way their subjects think, and the tone of that voice enlightens everything it touches."
—Sherod Santos
“Catherine Pierce has written an exhilarating book, one that rewards its lucky reader with intelligence and lyric grace and dance-hall, crushed corsage swing. A pure delight.”
—Lynne McMahon
“Pierce’s book won the 2007 Saturnalia Prize (selected that year by John Yau), but it possesses none of the signs of a first book. Her ambitions are high, but she often meets those ambitions–variety of topic with a consistency of voice, a willingness to dabble outside of the mainstream of poetry, and a substantial command of language balanced by grace and simplicity.”
—Patrick Kanouse, Gently Read Literature
"In her first collection, Pierce finds the right words and aranges them in provocative, evocative ways. Famous Last Words will not be the last we hear from her."
—Carrie Shiper, Prairie Schooner
Love Poem to Sinister Moments You are the dead swan floating in the Susquehanna. The red moon before a storm. You are the series of scars on a daughter’s arm. The tidy pool of blood on the 7-Eleven counter and the small white-haired woman who wipes it away. You are, when I’m driving, the sweet smell that may or may not be poison gas spilling over the city. You are cartoons interrupted by war, the odd-tasting drink at last call. You are the gunshots I mistake for celebration. Lancaster cornfields, and behind them, Three Mile Island, smoking against purple horizon. Your confidence astounds me. You arrive uninvited, grind glass into the pâté, spit in the gin, and are gone. I want your perfect broken backbone for my own. Your long, thin fingers that always know exactly which string to pull, which card will send the house tumbling down.
Catherine Pierce grew up in Delaware and now lives in Starkville, Mississippi, where she is an assistant professor of creative writing at Mississippi State University. She is also the author of a chapbook, Animals of Habit (Kent State, 2004).
