Catherine Wagner's My New Job (Fence, 2009)

What a nervy, original book! I'd dipped into it before but only recently read the whole. Here are a few favourite passages.




I lean forward on a nerve ebullient
my sweet alive and roasting in a current

from "Exercise 1 (11/28/00 PM)"

Good for M the comfortable-with-people to be away from me. tauten the cord to make it all more urgent

from "Exercise 7 (12/3/00 PM)"

The wheatrows flattened

gold, another dark

combed curve opened

like a stretchy

machine.

opening lines of "Exercise 21 (11/8/01 Am) [Back Seat of Minivan]"

Snow

starred when I looked straight up

sky dark gray, geese rose

in alarmed soft shh and hasping

long-necked geese

a-gossip all upset

*

all along I was alone to that

though everyone saw me

checking myself out by talking to them

when they checked themselves out in me

I tried to say O here have it all

     warm woolen flood     welcomer

          some spider-netting held it back,

kept growing over my warm and my intention to befriend

from "Exercise 34 (1/3/02 PM)"

All the following poems come from a section titled, "Everyone in the Room Is a Representative of the World at Large," and all the poems share that title. Each passage comes from a different poem.

I make the bird a flying fist

my violence goes on out along the stream.

---

My beast came up and hit me in the self.

---

It is not a hero

who will approach the mirror of

this appointment

and glide her thighs and torso to it.

That is me

These passages can't convey the experience of the undulations of a whole Wagner poem. For that, please purchase the book from Foyle's in the UK or your independent bookstore in the US.

Catherine Wagner's Macular Hole (Fence, 2004)

It's hard to excerpt from these poems as many work holistically; that is, individual passages often gain resonance because of their placement and so don't convey that power standing alone. Nonetheless, here's a sample.

I'm not stupidly assailed by moonlight

I'm an example, an experimental

Attempt to assess how a kid of my talents

Responds when she's given the life that I was

I'm the control and experiment bothly

you'll never get a result out of me

*

I'm total I'm all I'm absorbed in this meatcake

If I did all I could you'd shut up/be glad

Like fingers of a hand we all act as one

and aren't always needed, aren't needed as all

from "I'm total I'm all I'm absorbed in this meatcake"

Sleep for a long time and a thrust of activity: log rolling, fall off a skyscraper,

phenomenologues, cigarettes, korn, seeding herpes lip to lip.

Why LSD in the seventies, why coke in the eighties,

why Ecstasy in the nineties, why Ritalin.

To bolster the wandering mind; to bolster the wandering heart

to bolster the glamor; to glamor the wander.

The glamorous self and its story: no can do.

last 7 of 9 lines of "The divinity of man"

A day like a thing on a fork it arrives

from "A bash, and I wanna look good"

I call on creatures

Living in the sky today

I adjure you

Emerge and dive your wings and bodies

Prevail across the scary light

Cavernous several light

from "Song: Scary several light"

The prisoner is time, or my sense of it.

A great suction fattens

on my trés rich hours.

*

He can have vines because I can't drink wine

while I'm breastfeeding.

Tyrant. Asleep and saying huu,

fantastic waxen kicking

figurine, like a kick in the head, little

fat bag, a good drug

I see more of the

him in.

from "Perfect love"

Why was I writing so

much? Because I was impressed, & saddled up & ridden.

from "Imitating"

It's like we'll be together forever

so why should we talk. It's like parents.

As looking at yellow mountains

against blue sky. They're flaming

and it is your eyes.

last two stanzas of "Resume, face"

Macular Hole can be purchased from The Book Depository, with free worldwide shipping.