Catechesis: A Postpastoral (Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry) - Softcover

Lindsay Lusby (author)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1607816970 ISBN 13: 9781607816973

Publisher: The University of Utah Press, 2019

Synopsis

Winner of the 2018 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry

""A girl has two choices: / to be a tree or / to be the forest."" Catechesis combines Grimm fairy tales with horror movies and the Book of Revelation to construct a vision of the dangers and apocalyptic transformations inherent in girlhood. This lyric lore, which includes curious diagrams and collages of the botanical and the anatomical, contains hidden instructions to prepare girls for the hazards ahead.

In retelling lore alongside other Grimm-style stories, the poet turns horror classics The Silence of the Lambs and Alien into macabre fairy tales in their own right. Herein lurks violence and decay, but also a wild, overgrown beauty. Mothers and fathers are as much a part of this treacherous landscape as the carnivorous flora and shape-shifting fauna―and their effects are just as devastating. Framing all of this within biblical language and motifs gives these fabulist poems an ominous sense of urgency. Catechesis is a hybrid collection of textual and visual poems that examine belief and obsession. It explores how beauty leads to danger and danger births another kind of beauty, in a cycle of creation and destruction.

About this title

Review

"Lusby's shivery sequence strews a trail of gems through fairy tale's shadiest, most iconic location--the Forest. We meet our heroine in very unfortunate medias res--under the axe--but which way will fortune tilt? As each lyric spills its elixir, a swarm of dialogue and diagrams, allusions and images cluster like corpse-fauna, rise. Catechesis reminds us that every occult canon, every sweet herbarium is a library of poisons, and invites us to drink deep."
--Joyelle McSweeney, author of The Red Bird and The Commandrine and Other Poems

"Lindsay Lusby takes fairytales and horror movies and twists these stories into utterly new creations. Here the Brothers Grimm's "Maiden without hands" is a girl who elusively "prefers to imagine herself a bird" and asserts "An unhanded bird / is still a bird, / is still worth its weight in breadcrumbs." Time and again Lusby splinters off from language's predictable paths: "If a felled girl falls in a forest, / does it sound // inevitable?" In her collages, as in her poems, there are no barriers between humans, animals, and their environment, which results in eerie butterflies with bones and plants sprouting tooth-blossoms."--Matthea Harvey, author of If the Tabloids Are True What Are You?

Edition details

• Publisher: The University of Utah Press
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1607816970
• ISBN 13: 9781607816973
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 64