Fabulae

by Joy Katz

Overview

In Fabulae, Joy Katz interrogates the physical world, constructing a sensual and striking autobiography. She turns to the familiarity and strangeness of the female body, its surfaces and inner workings, often, although her subjects range from Thomas Jefferson to an Adam and Eve plagued with obsessive-compulsive disorder to the streets of New York’s diamond district. The poems, by turns funny and philosophical, point to how we suffer from desire: the danger, she writes, is that we might love the world “like heaven and be lost.” But they come back to delight in a flawed world especially the palpable beauty of words, and even the erotic shapes of the letterforms that make them up.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780809389216
Publisher:	Southern Illinois University Press
Publication date:	04/12/2002
Series:	Crab Orchard Series in Poetry
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	72
File size:	349 KB

About the Author

Joy Katz held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford University and the Nadya Aisenberg Fellowship at the MacDowell Colony. She has taught literature and writing at Stanford and at Washington University in St. Louis, where she received her M.F.A. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals including Antioch Review,Chelsea, Fence, and Southwest Review. She was trained in industrial design and works in Manhattan as a graphic designer, editor, and writer.

Table of Contents

Cover Title Page Copyright Contents Acknowledgments Following the Orthodox Men Women Must Put Off Their Rich Apparel Following the Orthodox Men From the Forest of Canes Concerning the Islands Newly Discovered Taxonomy A Nation So Ignorant of Itself Some Rain The Word Wife On Wardman Road From the Water Falling Abraham Considers Four Storeys Handwork Nuptial Solstice A Visit to Seattle Falling Toward the Furnace Tour Book of Norheastern States Sunday Morning and the Light The Word Wife Aubade Lullaby, Four A.M. The Old Woman's Delight Cafe Together In a Small Room In the Old Jewish Cemetery, Prague Metamorphosis Together in a Small Room (1975) At Terezin (1992) What Remains The Entrance To a False God 24th and Mission You Eat With Your Fingers Photograph of Plath Emergency To a False God L'Arrivee d'un Train en Gare O How Unlike the Place from Whence They Fall From That Tree, You Must Not Eat The Imperfect Is Our Paradise After John Taggart Note Found Inside a Mezuzah Still Life Colophon Notes Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry Back Cover

Editorial Reviews

Including such (mostly) wry headings as "Following the Orthodox Men," "The Word Wife" and "To a False God," the four sections of Katz's debut track Jefferson writing to Marbois, make "A Visit to Seattle" ("Leaves falling in mild air") and follow cats as they explore a house's open ducts. These fabulous moments, domestic and otherwise, "return the world already in progress: steaming milk, opening newspapers," but "At Terezin" can wonder, darkly, "how, traveling, I so easily grow accustomed to less. A window seat on a bus. A seat on a bus. A bus. A bed to myself. Some light." Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

“Joy Katz is the quintessential storyteller, spinning her marvelous tales out of the gossamer of the imagination, but always with the goal of capturing the flash and flicker of the real world. In her fine nets, she defamiliarizes the history we thought we knew and weaves her own voice, brilliant, mocking, passionate, clear as a bell, into the muffled sighs of a history that’s been hidden from us. But the pleasure of reading Fabulae comes also from the way the elements of narrative, from the simple to the fabulous, are compressed into beautifully crafted poems. There’s no background hum in this wonderful book—no skimming allowed. Katz combines the art of the fabulator with the art of the sculptor. Hers is a distinctive and original voice.”—Maura Stanton, author of Glacier Wine

“The coordinates for the landscape so beautifully staked out in Joy Katz’s Fabulae are language and desire, the dangerous and the fear that we might ‘like it like heaven . . . and be lost.’ In poems shot through with grace, intellect, and control, Katz considers the history and culture we all stand, finally, as heirs to: from Dachau to the deceptively still surfaces of American suburbia, from Proserpina to Plath, from the subjugation of women to the lust for empire—the result is a collection as rich as it is ambitious, announcing an already accomplished new voice in poetry.”—Carl Phillips, author of Pastoral

From the Publisher