INSECTUM GRAVITIS
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The Mistress
3: A Taos Press 2016 Winner of NM/AZ Book Award in Poetry 2017 These breathtaking poems bypass the careful brain to speak a purer, distilled language of the body. Sensuous, keening, celebratory, they do more than create a chorus of voices that transform the progress of Parkinson’s Disease into a kind of Greek play, although that would have been achievement enough. Poem by poem, Strisik breaks syntax and remakes it into gestures that startle and invite the reader to linger, and into cadences that reflect emotions too complex to name but are immediately searing. This collection itself is body and breath: It brings us to language by a hidden door we may not have known was there, and in this sense, it is challenging yet trustworthy at every moment.
—Leslie Ullman, Progress on the Subject of Immensity “Grief swells inside silks,” Strisik writes in her latest collection of poems The Mistress. Indeed, eroticism mingles with deception, tenderness is interrupted by violence, & physical pleasure dissolves into the slow deterioration of the mind brought on by disease, among the other sources. Strisik’s lines—in turns taut, frenetic, & fragmented—surprise over & over, revealing the myriad fissures of language & lives rocked by seduction, equally alluring & toxic. These are daring, & successful because of their daring, poems. -Alexander Long, author of Still Life Eros and Pathos infuse this uncommonly unified collection—a coherent, albeit polysemic, verse narrative—with a linguistic power that educes as much erotic energy and spiritual passion as it presents. Catherine Strisik trusts the profoundly suggestive reach of the poetic—the ongoing reach of the parabolic word—to address the body’s decline and in so doing articulates a vision of the spirit’s recovery. -Scott Cairns, author of Slow Pilgrim: The Collected Poems |
Thousand- Cricket Song, Plain View Press , 2010, 2016 The keen eye of compassion in each detail, the steady touch of its cadence in each unfolding line. - Olga Broumas, Rave: Poems Here is a perfect, clean and delicate (powerful and often terrifying) work of art. In its simplicity lies profound emotion, both beautiful and laden with sadness. These masterful slim poems speak with discipline and exquisite fervor. This is a very moving portrait of a land, its people, and the universal human spirit. - John Nichols, The Milagro Beanfield War Excerpts TUOL SLENG PRISON Please say each skull has a voice and an appetite. When I press my ear to their jaws, crab shells and dried rice drop out. Then their smells rise to me: lemon grass, coriander, mint leaves. Now empty their sustenance. Disquieted their once envied salts and palm sugar. Please say each skull has a voice. What can I do with you, my sound, their tongues’ undressing. Previously Published in Southwest Literary Center Anthology, 2006 SHADE The famous Khmer artist has placed his palm on a murderer’s upper back near the neck, has pushed him toward the painting on the prison museum’s wall. Outside the perimeter the mother is mute on her knees. Her hands cradle a beautiful fatigue as if she had just remembered why: a bayonet blade held upright to catch an infant as it spins through the air. The shade shades the body this evening in Phnom Penh. He cleans his brushes alone each day in the medicinal turpentine, wipes his palette clean, and becomes silent. The painting is his settlement with humiliation. You can hear the crickets’ trill in the banyans. You can hear the whole evening is crying louder. Previously Published in Fogged Clarity, 2009 |