Oracle: Poems

Cate Marvin

$17.80

Publication Date: July 12th, 2016

Publisher:

W. W. Norton & Company

ISBN:

9780393353136

Pages:

Description

A witty and elegiac new collection from the author of "exhilarating, fierce [and] powerful” verse (Robert Pinsky, Washington Post).

The speakers of Oracle occupy the outer-borough cityscape of New York's Staten Island, where they move through worlds glittering with refuse and peopled by ghosts—of a dead lover, of a friend lost to suicide, of a dog with glistening eyes. Marvin's haunting, passionate poems explore themes of loss, of the vulnerability of womanhood in a world hostile to it, and of the fraught, strangely compelling landscape of adolescence.

About the Author

Cate Marvin is the author of Fragment of the Head of a Queen and World's Tallest Disaster. A winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Prize and a Whiting Award, her poetry has been published in the Paris Review, Poetry, Tin House, and elsewhere. A cofounder of VIDA and a professor of English at CUNY, she lives in Maplewood, New Jersey.

Praise for Oracle: Poems

Poems finely tuned . . . full of inventive echoes and

spring-loaded syntax.
— Dialogist

She takes no prisoners.
— NPR

Intense and intimate.
— Rumpus

Channels the colorful voices of Staten Island.
— Vanity Fair

Spectral, charged poems: a wild, ferocious bunch capable of emotional darkness, bound by a strong poetic I . . . a successful call to arms.
— Publisher's Weekly

These are poems of feeling, memory, and calamity, of a life lived near the edge and an edge that nevertheless always resolves itself into a haunting ethical music. This is a wonderful collection of poems. It makes a powerful claim on the reader at every turn, on every page.
— Eavan Boland