Synopses & Reviews
Catherine Wagner's Miss America makes poetry of contemporary erudition and confession out of a new sort of baroque plain speech. Wagner's roving eye and ear take into consideration all the offerings of our world magazines, breakfast, ghosts and find brilliant encryptions of human physical reality in perfect words. Nothing is too far away or too close to warrant reaction: Good Housekeeping, Edmund Spenser, mayonnaise, boobs, death; all compose Wagner's vernacular of music and knowledge, a kind of thinking out loud that translates into a witty, vertiginous awareness.
Review
"The poems of Catherine Wagner are instantly sacramental, immediately mysterious. Showing songlines to Spicer's profanity and to Zukofsky's purest register, they move through musics entirely their own. There, Miss America finds a broken world wide-open but unharmed. There, Wagner proves the wisdom of divided hearts. She is a mage and marvel. I believe she is our best." Donald Revell
Review
"Jack Spicer's Martians are back, but now they're talking wild girl-talk. In Catherine Wagner's Miss America, public and private collide in a new way, like matter and anti-matter. This is a conflagration. 'That is damage talk,' she says, 'Want to watch me/Make it.' And I do. In fact, if I died, I might want to come back as Catherine Wagner." Rae Armantrout
Synopsis
"MISS AMERICA finds a world wide-open but unharmed. Wagner is a mage and a marvel."
--Donald Russell
About the Author
Catherine Wagner is the author of several chapbooks, most recently Boxes, from Seeing Eye Books, and Hotel Faust, from West House Books. Her prizes include a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship, an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Greg Grummer Prize from Phoebe Magazine, and a Steffensen Cannon Fellowship at the University of Utah. She earned her B.A. from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, and a Ph.D in English from the University of Utah. Born in Barma, she grew up in Baltimore and now lives in Boise, Idaho, with her husband, poet Martin Corless-Smith.