Cat's Tongue: Poems (The TRP Chapbook Series)
Description
Cat’s Tongue is the latest publication from California-based writer Kathleen Winter, author of three award-winning poetry collections. Armed with wit, charm, and original imagery, she engages with incidents in her Texas youth that range from traumatic to ecstatic—strewing oilfields, deer, drug dealers, and football games in between. These poems vary widely in style and subject matter, but they share precisely crafted language and this writer’s unique perspective on a central Texas childhood.
The TRP Chapbook Series
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from “Each Day a New Round of Sadness”
Islands of the Hawaiian archipelago are connected
to each other under the surface of the sea.
Under the surface of the sea something roils
like a volcano preparing to explode.
To explode sometimes suggests a solution
to the situation of constraint, ubiquitous
as fear these days, when stasis is a prize.
A prize, that is, compared to illness.
Can’t wellness sink its teeth deep into me
to feel acutely as a wound?
A wound is what the dream delivers
with an image of my mother
wreathed in Hawaiian flowers—
tuberose releasing its cloying
daylong ennui.
Praise for Cat's Tongue: Poems (The TRP Chapbook Series)
“In Kathleen Winter’s new collection, Cat’s Tongue, memory is a thing to encounter untamed, to be rediscovered and confronted before it’s lost again. These poems ‘go backwards / in experience, subtracting yes from yes’ as they unearth secrets and regrets and yearnings, as they reckon the past with the present. Through the glint and gloom of memory, these poems portray the self in all its strength and grief, all with Winter’s trademark keenness and lyrical grace.”
—W. Todd Kaneko, author of This Is How the Bone Sings
“Winter’s wildly gorgeous and moving chapbook, Cat’s Tongue, confronts the horrors and joys of youth and aging with both sass and humility. Winter’s deft craft pairs with her wide-ranging aesthetics to make poems that manage to surprise on every page. They are little revelations with rough tongues ready to love their readers raw.”
—John A. Nieves, author of Curio
"Expect the unexpected in Kathleen Winter’s Cat’s Tongue."
—Lone Star Literary Life
