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$14
978-0-9754990-7-8

Famous Last Words
poetry by Catherine Pierce


Winner of the 2007 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize
Selected by John Yau

$14


 

“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

 

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).

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Last Update: January 19, 2008