"Fragment of the Head of a Queen makes it clear why Cate Marvin is becoming one of our essential poets."-Rodney Jones Cate Marvin's new poems, their wrought music, unblinking focus, and hard-edged sensuality, are wreathed with an entirely different silence than her first collection. The brokenness and loss of the fragmented queen-seeming to rise up through centuries-is their tutelary spirit. Cate Marvin is the author of World's Tallest Disaster, awarded the 2000 Kathryn A. Morton Prize by Robert Pinsky and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award (2002). She teaches creative writing in Staten Island, New York.

"'From the blood-soaked cover image of a Snow White — like figure to the final poem ('You Cut Open'), there is both violence and humor in the 42 lyrics of Marvin's second book. In her often amped-up sonics ('standing neck-deep in a pit, whisky-pitched, ether-lit'), her formal skill and her penchant for anger-filled poems on the love/hate of self and beloved, Marvin (World's Tallest Disaster) suggests a postmodern Plath. But the smirk on the speaker's face — she is both deadly serious and deadly funny — points these poems past melodrama. 'Dear less-than-a-man,' writes Marvin, 'I think with my blood.' Often the humor comes when the absurdity of the actual world is mixed with that of the speaker's world ('my unsubsidized loan heart'). Marvin also manages a more intimate voice: 'I would be the worm to your rain soaked side/ walk.' Such tenderness is welcome among so much grief, but so is the ambivalence of Marvin's elegy detailing a lover's autopsy. Readers who can believe 'all love/ should be loud enough to scare off the neighbors' will swoon for this work.' Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Marvin's first book, World's Tallest Disaster (Sarabande, 2002) was awarded the 2001 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry by Robert Pinsky and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award (2002). Her poems have appeared in New England Review, The Antioch Review, The Paris Review, The Georgia Review, and Ploughshares, among others. She is a creative writing professor in Staten Island,