Catherine Wagner

Wagner's poems proclaim, among other things, a finitude--"I'm total I'm all I'm absorbed in this meatcake"--that is anything but final, that is instead embodied and generative. From the completion of the human body arise the actions of the human mind; it is these that Wagner charts, with affection, detachment, a measured embarrassment, and a calculated grossness, in defiance of all recommendation. That Wagner is in love with the world and its transactions--perception, superficial and otherwise; childbearing, painful and otherwise; domestic arrangement, satisfactory and otherwise; gains, financial and otherwise--allows for a poetry that is full of song yet brazenly topical: Its subjects range from the controlled experiment of selfhood to the blooming and pruning of personal dynamics on a road-trip to " . . . God and country / given up and given." In this, Catherine Wagner's second book, we spy a poet espousing, somewhat fearful of her mandate and putting that fear to good use in the service of real exchange.

Macular Hole

Miss America

Luis I. Prádanos

Suzanne M. McCullagh

Ilaria Tabusso Marcyan

Contesting Extinctions: Decolonial and Regenerative Futures critically interrogates the discursive framing of extinctions and how they relate to the systems that bring about biocultural loss. The chapters in this multidisciplinary volume examine approaches to ecological and social extinction and resurgence from a variety of fields, including environmental studies, literary studies, political science, and philosophy. Grounding their scholarship in decolonial, Indigenous, and counter-hegemonic frameworks, the contributors advocate for shifting the discursive focus from ruin to regeneration.

Decolonial and Regenerative Futures

Contesting Extinctions

On Martin's Conjecture

In this third collection, Catherine Wagner assumes a mantle of responsibility. Each opportunity for productivity is a personal call-out; she responds, "diligent and strict." A repetitive stretching exercise produces sectional meditations on obedience to self, and to ambition, and the limitations of he body as container, while the obligation to include others in one's apprehension of the room, or self, causes Wagner's slangy, spoken, and singing world of representation to slide from syntactic unit to unit, making room for a galaxy of metonymy. "Things mean, and I can't tell them not to." What's going on inside is a watchful self-regard that invites eros to play. Further exploration takes Wagner close into sexual fantasy- the desire for a debased object- and the politics thereof: "Well I expect you to go into the/ fucking human tunnel/ I'm going." In each of the four series that make up this book we find a female body watching itself and marking that watching with a severe wit, charmed visuals, and the analytic prowess of a born human.

My New Job

Rebecca Wolff

The experiences of motherhood are not to be met with silence and/or platitudes. This anthology brings to light the many strong, scary, gorgeous motherhood poems being written right now--poems that address the politics and difficulties and stubborn satisfactions of mothering--while it reminds us of earlier poems that opened the space in which this new work might appear. Motherhood is a universal solvent: Contributors to this anthology come from all over the aesthetic map, and from different states of childgetting--adoption, single parenthood, new mothers, mothers of adults. Not for Mothers Only will abolish any comfortable prejudices about what poems on motherhood can or cannot do or say.

Catherine Wagner

Books

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