Synopses & Reviews
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.
Synopsis
Poetry. A third book of poems by a gurlesque pioneer who continues her intimate and formally inventive exploration of gender, sex, commerce, and power.
Synopsis
"In My New Job 'The women step out, the men go in' and the edifice C. Wagner's made seems an increasingly wider and wider kind of turningcolossal and somaticthrough her own body and the bodies of others. Cathy's Job is a joyous multiple. It's a lift."Eileen Myles
Synopsis
"'My New Job' is the description of work itself.... The book is a raucous public accounting."
--C.S. Giscombe
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 University in Oxford, Ohio.