Guernica Editions
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Bewilderness
Guernica Editions, Fall 2019
80 pages
Trade Paperback
ISBN13: 9781771833998
ISBN10: 1771833998
English
$20.00 Canada, $20.00 US
Read more from the Essential Poets Series
Bewilderness explores urban and suburban wildernesses-- threshold places--in a darkly comedic, surreal set of prose poems. In Bewilderness, urban and suburban landscapes come to life as
shape-shifting places, enchanted places, mundane places of magical thinking, as the reader explores the heterotopias of playgrounds and backyards, lakefront parks, splintery subdivisions, and semi-industrial wastelands. Creatures that inhabit these edged-out corners of land take on the features and neuroses of their human cohabitants in poems that are direct, declarative missives with offbeat
instructions for navigating and inhabiting these liminal worlds.
We picked rhinestones from wings of sunglasses and searched the golden tongues of shoes for white-lies or pennies that might have been left behind.
Black’s poems read like an I spy: a crush of beloved items, textures, ideas. People are described by the objects in their houses, by the things they gather and guard. It feels like pastiche, like a dream, like watching an enterprising songbird build a nest out of foraged scraps and garbage, out of “glass and ash, nests of cigarette butts and pigeon down” (“A Home from Nothing”). Black writes: “I know the panic of assembling a home from nothing.” These poems seem to whisper: even nothing can be made into everything you need.
Dessa Bayrock, Arc Poetry Magazine
In Bewilderness, each item in the notebook of everything is connected by an invisible thread to each other thing. Catherine Black weaves her poems with these threads, connecting the luminosity, resonance and being of the everyday, its complex web of perceptions and emotions with evocative sensory and conceptual allure. We are
bewilderedin that everything, even the familiar, is newly discovered, wild to possibility, observation and poetry. As this book reads our world, we read this book: with eyes wild open.
Gary Barwin, author of Yiddish for Pirates
Black tends to write in direct, declarative sentences, but she achieves an incantatory urgency through repetition and a build-up of expressive images.
Barbara Carey, Toronto Star
From the natural world to the liminal space between dream and hard reality, Catherine Black reveals the strange and beautiful in these leaping image prose poems. I was uplifted by this collection: it is both shelter and nourishment.
Carolyn Smart, author of Careen
Awards
- Pat Lowther Memorial Award (longlisted)
Reviews
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On ‘Bewilderness’ by Catherine Black
Anomaly magazine - October 15, 2019
Books by Catherine Black
