Description
Book SynopsisBewilderness explores urban and suburban wildernesses--threshold places--in a darkly comedic, surreal set of prose poems. In Bewilderness, urban and suburban landscapes come to life as shape-shifting places, enchanted places, mundane places of magical thinking, as the reader explores the heterotopias of playgrounds and backyards, lakefront parks, splintery subdivisions, and semi-industrial wastelands. Creatures that inhabit these edged-out corners of land take on the features and neuroses of their human co-habitants in poems that are direct, declarative missives with offbeat instructions for navigating and inhabiting these liminal worlds.
Trade Review"Black tends to write in direct, declarative sentences, but she achieves an incantatory urgency through repetition and a build-up of expressive images." -- Barbara Carey, Toronto Star
"In Bewilderness, each item in the notebook of everything is connected by an invisible thread to each other thing. Catherine Black weaves her poems with these threads, connecting the luminosity, resonance and being of the everyday, its complex web of perceptions and emotions with evocative sensory and conceptual allure. We are "bewildered" in that everything, even the familiar, is newly discovered, wild to possibility, observation and poetry. As this book reads our world, we read this book: with eyes wild open." -- Gary Barwin, author of Yiddish for Pirates
"From the natural world to the liminal space between dream and hard reality, Catherine Black reveals the strange and beautiful in these leaping image prose poems. I was uplifted by this collection: it is both shelter and nourishment." -- Carolyn Smart, author of Careen
