Fieldglass

by Catherine Pond

Overview

Sexual identity, female friendship, and queer experiences of love
 
Fraught with obsession, addiction, and unrequited love, Catherine Pond’s Fieldglass immerses us in the speaker’s transition from childhood to adulthood. A queer coming-of-age, this collection is a candid exploration of sexual identity, family dynamics, and friendships that elude easy categorization, offering insight on the ambiguous nature of identity. 
 
Saturated by her surroundings and permeated by the emotional lives of those close to her, the speaker struggles with feelings of displacement, trauma, and separateness. She is perpetually in transit, with long drives, flights, and train rides—moving most often between the city and the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains. As the collection unfolds, the speaker journeys toward adulthood, risking intimacy and attempting to undo her embedded impulses toward silence and absorption.
 
Reflective, graceful, and understated, Pond’s images accumulate power through restraint and suggestion. Deeply personal and intense, searching and yearning, associative and lyric, Fieldglass is a confessional about growing up, loving hard, and letting go. 
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780809338146
Publisher:	Southern Illinois University Press
Publication date:	03/19/2021
Series:	Crab Orchard Series in Poetry
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	90
Sales rank:	456,217
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Catherine Pond is a cofounder, with Julia Anna Morrison, of the online literary magazine Two Peach. For four years, she was the assistant director of the New York State Summer Writers Institute. Her poems have appeared in AGNI, The Adroit Journal, Poetry Northwest, and Salmagundi, among others. Currently, she teaches writing at the University of Southern California.

Read an Excerpt

LIKE RAIN

My father digs me out of snow with a shovel.
With the record player on, or alone in my room

I trace the invisible illness growing inside me.
You come and then you go like summer rain.

You come and then you go. I float hands-free
over an altar of knives. You come and then

you go like summer rain. You come and then
you go. Like rain. Like rain. Like summer rain.


I’M A YOUNG COWBOY AND KNOW I’VE DONE WRONG

I’m a young cowboy and know I’ve done wrong,
my father sang as I emerged from the river.

She likes wearing men’s clothes, let her wear them,
said my mother, tying his denim shirt around my neck.

Under the surface of the water, rocks glimmered
like small hearts. Here’s the mountain

where we stood in order of height, stars flashing
across our faces. What my father could not give my mother

she gave to herself. I wanted to be like that;
like the lawnmower, commanding respect, a steady echo.

Instead I was more like the grass, in love
with being severed, and later, with finding those parts

of myself that had been buried, thin blades
only the fresh spring rain had the power to recover.


MONHEGAN

Ledged in a memory
of being moored, what chafes
at the edge of the wharf

answers no. Spring tide,
neap tide, against-tide, still the kiss
is what you current for most.

Rum-runner
coursing the mouth, scraping bottom,
teething at the keel. Come closer,

winter is over. This sudden foam,
this rush, this third-quarter moon,
these are for you

and they come only once.
How fast. And with how many hulls.


AT THE SUNOCO IN WEST VIRGINIA

My father is dreamy, forgetful, aloof. But I’ve never actually been left
behind before. I walk behind an aisle of Frito Lays and burst into tears.

I should’ve eaten the eggs he bought me at the Super 8. I should’ve saved
my allowance like he’d said. I should’ve made myself bigger, louder,

less forgettable. A female customer has her eyes locked on me as she speaks
into her boxy cellphone: Yes, maybe two minutes ago. Looks about ten,

barefoot, wearing pink pajamas. It takes about five minutes, but Dad
still beats the cops back to the station. His arms are too tan from years

on the water, moles dark as moons, and he takes me in them gingerly,
as if I am already dead, and because I’ve never heard him cry I whisper,

It’s okay, daddy, I’m okay. He smells of unwashed denim and paint thinner.
He doesn’t notice the people staring, or the cop car rolling slow motion

into the station, or the woman watching our reunion with her hands
over her mouth, relief that I am not actually abandoned,

although at some point, I will be, we will all be, as she knows,
as she too has been abandoned. I am eleven and lucky. No one is yet dead.

It will be months before anyone dies. God forgive me, he whispers
into my child’s ear, and I realize in this scenario, I am the God

to whom he speaks. I could wield my power, but won’t. Mom is across
the country. Dad wears a gold chain around his neck. I reach for it.


ALEXEI

More than once I found him bleeding uncontrollably.
Bleeding in his bed, bleeding against the walls.

In pain, we were inadequate, though I was quieter,
healthier I suppose. Once, I found him shuffling in my tutu,

fondling his crotch under the milky tulle.
He knew before I did what the world held in store.

My brother, little Tsarevitch in women’s clothes.
Afternoons, the doctor spoke to him; I was permitted

only to watch, rake the sand back and forth
in its stupid box. I felt sorry for my father.
​
When you write to your mother, he said,
remember to tell her how happy we are.

Table of Contents

Like Rain 1

I'm a Young Cowboy and Know I've Done Wrong 2

Monhegan 3

At the Sunoco in West Virginia 4

Alexei 5

Threnody 6

Driving through Mystic 7

In the Sulfur Baths 11

Tatiana 12

Riding the Bus Back to Oxford 13

Deer in Bright Snow 14

Sub-Zero 15

Dispersal 16

Fawn Lake 17

Frozen Water 18

Summer House 23

From the Faraway, Nearby 24

Manhattan Ave 25

In the Duty-Free Shop 26

The Gallery 27

Epilogue 28

Forest 29

Driving to Speculator 35

Rehab 36

Christmas in Alpharetta 37

Mithridatism 38

Master Bedroom 39

Arrival 43

Grief 45

Winter Sister 46

Dream Elegy 48

Blue Ridge 50

University of Iowa Museum of Natural History 52

Riding the Invisible Horse 55

Blue Angels Air Show 56

Sex Poem 57

Bare Earth 58

At the Base of Mount Beacon 59

New York 60

March 9th, Dusk 63

Floodplain 65

August in the Adirondacks 67

Fly-Over States 68

Forest Horse 69

Eidolon 70

Notes 73

Acknowledgments 75

Editorial Reviews

04/19/2021

Pond’s scintillating debut examines family history, female friendship, geography, and sexual identity in poems of startling craft and vision. Many entries contend with the pressure to conform to normative sexualities, and Pond uses the apt metaphor of snow to express a sense of suffocation: “Snow fell forever/ in that room/ and the heater moaned/ in the electrical closet.” Images convey much of the speaker’s internal fears of isolation, rejection, even institutionalization: “The pine trees/ stood tall in their refusal, antique, undiagnosed.” The speaker’s awakening to queer perspectives on desire opens up new and complex possibilities of relating to the body and erotic love: “For years I let no one touch me. I had myself to preserve./ Not to mention the poems, which, like rocks, refused penetration./ It was a surprise to discover my body, collapsed like a bridge,/ but still beautiful, still wet with snow.” Throughout, poems accumulate and echo off one another, unveiling a distinctive and highly perceptive queer identity on the page. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"Pond’s scintillating debut examines family history, female friendship, geography, and sexual identity in poems of startling craft and vision. Throughout, poems accumulate and echo off one another, unveiling a distinctive and highly perceptive queer identity on the page."—Publishers Weekly

“With this single breathtaking debut, Catherine Pond has earned her place among the most powerful, visionary, and inventive poets of her generation. Her poetry, with its visceral lyric grace and nuanced modulations, recalls the work of a young Louise Glück in its naked disquiet, its sense of imagistic reflection, and its arresting beauty. Often gestural, elliptical, and devastating, Pond’s poems assemble into luminous constellations of echoing loss. Gripping Fieldglass in your hands, it is impossible ever to look away.”—David St. John, author of The Last Troubadour: Selected and New Poems
 
“The poems in Fieldglass are astonishing in their honesty, and I devoured their fearlessness greedily. Pond charts fantasy, family, and the painful trust and powerful abandonments that teach us what love is. Concise, lyrical, and rife with compelling turns, this book brings the world close and helps you see it, helps you know it, helps you bear its truths.”—Traci Brimhall, author of Rookery and Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod
 
“What is the syntax of longing? The speaker of Pond’s debut collection conjures earthquakes, partial moons, and the mild lakes of her childhood. We witness the phantasmic powers of Pond’s imagination, a poet who spots horse teeth baring in the mist and feels the centrifugal pull of a sinister darkness. Amidst these dimensions of desire and apparition, Pond reveals the geography of a theatrical unconscious. Elegant and unsettling, the poems remake the reader and offer us an emotional complexity that we desperately need.”—Megan Fernandes, author of Good Boys
 
“At once Greek in its fatalism and, increasingly, all-American in its faith in self-determination, Fieldglass speculates its way through clouds of complex family dynamics, sexual trauma, and extreme agape in order to be beaten in the end into a depth of self-knowledge that is sister to wisdom and predawn of strength. ‘Nothing ever really breaks,’ Pond writes, ‘though force can cause a flexible object to deform.’ One of the many gifts of this brilliant collection is to remind us that deformation like this produces not necessarily a compromise to identity but, often, the fullest realization of it.”—Timothy Donnelly, author of The Problem of the Many

“Where Fieldglass stands apart from its peers […] is in Pond’s ease with retrospective narrative. Confident in themselves and in the force of the experiences they relate, these poems possess a clarity as impactful as it is rare, in first books at least; Fieldglass seems refreshingly immaculate, in other words, of the ludic, deliberately weird writing that characterizes many debuts, including some of the most celebrated.”—Preposition

From the Publisher