Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Cat Dixon's What Happens in Nebraska takes the reader and the narrator on an
emotional roller-coaster ride, often cresting and plunging in the same poem.
Yearning for success, her speaker vacillates between a tentative, vulnerable
confidence and a grudging self-belittlement. She longs for collaboration, but
finds it alien to her personality and imagination, and her partner's insistence on his
freedom excludes her (he even horribly lists her mistakes), until she longs to start
over, "to hit the reset button." Her obstacles are internal and external: knots,
stalking wolves, erasure, tidal currents, tornadoes-and lovers: "This is how love /
always ends-one left / to drown, one safe on shore." Perhaps most terrifying of her
poems is "Horror Movie," which starts off with naive romance but devolves into the
disturbing and painful conventions of ordinary life. Within the same scheme of
modern life, the narrator finds herself "tied up / with the vacuum cleaner cord."
Dixon's images embody themes which exquisitely convey the acidic nature
of modern relationships. Catullus established the "Odi et amo" (I hate and I
love) motif in poetry; Dixon elaborates the same theme for the 21st century.