Synopses & Reviews
The speakers of occupy the outer-borough cityscape of New York's Staten Island, moving through worlds glittering with refuse and peopled by ghosts. Cate Marvin's haunting, passionate poems explore themes of loss, the vulnerability of womanhood in a world hostile to it, and the fraught, strangely compelling landscape of adolescence.
Review
" explores the devastating experiences of womanhood--hurricane season, dead girl season, break-up season--the stations she weathers as she rises from the ruin with her wits intact. Electric and triumphant, delivers Marvin's trademark bravado in poems about the darkly human journey." Rigoberto González
Review
"These are poems of feeling, memory, and calamity, of a life lived near the edge and an edge that nevertheless always resolves itself into a haunting ethical music. This is a wonderful collection of poems. It makes a powerful claim on the reader at every turn, on every page." Eavan Boland
Review
"When action arrives in a Cate Marvin poem, it's like she's a superhero aiming incisive critiques. However, what is to be trusted here is her ear and her wry humor. No one will beg to disagree: increasingly, Cate Marvin is a force whose beseeching rhythms make her one of the most gifted poets of her generation." Eavan Boland
Review
"E. M. Cioran claimed that 'salvation is the death of song.' Three books in, and Cate Marvin shows no signs of having been saved. Film noir troubador, Staten Island flâneur, metaphysical deerstalker: this the poet of pursuant dread, of the ghost-infested Thou, and of the despairing American endlessness of self. Dark? Yes. But the balm, in , is the power of the Marvin-speaker's sense of humor--'I once had a quasi- / Victorian way about me'--which is at its most politic and disarming the closer it gets to the shadow." Major Jackson
Review
"Watch out for Cate Marvin: she takes no prisoners in her lush, unapologetically aggressive poems... You won't leave this book feeling inspired, but, somehow, you'll feel fortified. Marvin understands that this is a cold world." Craig Morgan Teicher
Review
"A collection...of spectral, charged poems: a wild, ferocious bunch capable of emotional darkness, bound by a strong poetic I...a successful call to arms." Publishers Weekly
Review
"Channels the colorful voices of Staten Island." Vanity Fair
Synopsis
The speakers of Oracle occupy the outer-borough cityscape of New York's Staten Island, where they move through worlds glittering with refuse and peopled by ghosts of a dead lover, of a friend lost to suicide, of a dog with glistening eyes. Marvin's haunting, passionate poems explore themes of loss, of the vulnerability of womanhood in a world hostile to it, and of the fraught, strangely compelling landscape of adolescence.
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Synopsis
A witty and elegiac new collection from the author of "exhilarating, fierce [and] powerful" verse (Robert Pinsky, ).
About the Author
Cate Marvin is the author of Fragment of the Head of a Queen and World's Tallest Disaster. A winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Prize and a Whiting Award, her poetry has been published in the Paris Review, Poetry, Tin House, and elsewhere. A cofounder of VIDA and a professor of English at CUNY, she lives in Maplewood, New Jersey.