Macular Hole / Edition 1

by Catherine Wagner

Overview

Catherine Wagner's poems proclaim a finitude that is anything but final, that is instead embodied and generative. That Wagner is in love with the world and its transactions—perceptions, superficial and otherwise; childbearing, painful and otherwise; gains, financial and otherwise—allows for a poetry that is full of song yet brazenly topical.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780974090917
Publisher:	Fence Magazine, Incorporated
Publication date:	04/01/2004
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	64
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Poet Catherine Wagner was born to military parents in Burma and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. Wagner is a graduate of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop, and the University of Utah's Ph.D in Literature program. She is Assistant Professor at Miami Universityin Oxford, Ohio.

Table of Contents

My what to replacy my I'm total I'm all I'm absorbed in this meatcake The divinity of man I was at congress with myself I walked in the house Kill so we feel safe and comfortable Freely esposa Wrought in filigree and wrought in granite Scary ballad Song A bash, and I wanna look good San Francisco ballad An hendy hap There was a place in the brain, a red knot Big bang Who admitted you?
Song: Scary several light Perfect love Inmost For you everywhere Phoebus the fields of song are laid out Imitating Coming toward me Not very much is abstracted Allied with it were all receptacles Spatchocked boy, broken in transmission Macular Hole I don't believe in bodiless Levee I awake possessed by God Resyme, face The violence career of God Induce

What People are Saying About This

Clayton Eshleman

"At the jointure of aether-headed Spicer and the manic Plath,
making faces like a playpen, or a mycelian language pump,
it is Catherine Wagner, in gadfly and unending redefinition,
rhyme-peened but not rhyme-owned,
a sparkler torqueing in the muck."

Editorial Reviews

In this unexpectedly direct sophomore effort, Wagner blends charm with aggression. Wagner's Miss America (2001) showed a wary critic of consumer culture questioning linguistic givens; these poems, while no less self-conscious, show considerably more verve. "I'm an example, and experimental/ Attempt to assess how a kid of my talents/ Responds when she's given the life that I was," one poem says; two pages later, though, Wagner disavows "The glamorous self and its story." Ragged exclamations and folk and playground rhymes give her choppy, hip discourse surprising energy; her anger-and her willingness to identify its causes-set it further apart. Some of those causes come from sexual experience, others from the travails of raising a young son. Childbearing and motherhood take over the second half of this fairly short book, to fiery effect: "I hate the baby, stop crying... I hate you coming over my life like a bag"; "At my breast/ He sold himself/ To me as my/ Needer." Readers accustomed to canny ironies may find her "outrageous,/ power-outageous" interjections too demonstrative, but her powerful ends finally justify their strenuous means. (June) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

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