Fawn Lake
You like sex with other womenbecause it makes you feel safe,she says. Nothing makes mefeel safe, I explain. She is marriedbut when her daughter winsthe fishing contest at Sacandaga,she offers me the prize trout.Later, loosening the fleshfrom the spine, I do not feelrelieved, or thankful. She who knowsme best believed I might benourished by this small, dead thing.
Feature Date
- October 26, 2021
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From Fieldglass, a book in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry, Southern Illinois University Press.
Copyright © 2021 by Catherine Pond.
Catherine Pond is the author of Fieldglass, winner of the Crab Orchard First Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in Best New Poets, Best American Nonrequired Reading, AGNI, Salmagundi, and other publications. Pond is a PhD candidate in Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Southern California, where she teaches writing. With Julia Anna Morrison, she is the co-founder and co-editor of the online literary magazine Two Peach.
Carbondale, Illinois
"With this single breathtaking debut, Catherine Pond has earned her place among the most powerful, visionary, and inventive poets of her generation. Her poetry, with its visceral lyric grace and nuanced modulations, recalls the work of a young Louise Glück in its naked disquiet, its sense of imagistic reflection, and its arresting beauty. Often gestural, elliptical, and devastating, Pond’s poems assemble into luminous constellations of echoing loss. Gripping Fieldglass in your hands, it is impossible ever to look away."
—David St. John, author of The Last Troubadour: Selected and New Poems
"The poems in Fieldglass are astonishing in their honesty, and I devoured their fearlessness greedily. Pond charts fantasy, family, and the painful trust and powerful abandonments that teach us what love is. Concise, lyrical, and rife with compelling turns, this book brings the world close and helps you see it, helps you know it, helps you bear its truths."
—Traci Brimhall, author of Rookery and Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod
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