Game of Boxes
Graywolf Press, 2012
In Catherine Barnett's The Game of Boxes, love stutters its way in and out of both family and erotic bonds. Whittled down to song and fragments of story, these poems teeter at the edge of dread. A gang of unchaperoned children, grappling with blame and forgiveness, speak with tenderness and disdain about “the mothers” and “the fathers,” absent figures they seek in “the faces of clouds” and in the cars that pass by. The central poem, a sequence of nocturnes, eschews almost everything but the ghostly erotic. These are bodies at the edge of experience, watchful and defamiliarized.
PRAISE
“There is an ancient voice in these poems of our moment, rare and piercing, sometimes ecstatic... This collection is utterly modern, particular, and strange–strange as in not previously visited, strange as in deeply original.”
—Ilya Kaminsky
“Catherine Barnett’s utterly clear lyrics start in the quotidian and then unpredictably take a sudden half-turn into another world–mythological, metaphor, fantastic–and in so doing assume a crystalline other dimension. They refresh, clarify, and invigorate the mind.”
—Lydia Davis
EXCERPT
Chorus
Everyone asks us what we're afraid of
but children aren't supposed to say.
We could put loneliness on the list.
We could put the list on the list, its infinity.
We could put infinity down.
About the Author
Catherine Barnett is the author of four poetry collections: Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space, Human Hours (winner of the Believer Book Award), The Game of Boxes (winner of the James Laughlin Award), and Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced. A Guggenheim fellow and recipient of an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and letters, she teaches at NYU and works as an independent editor. Read more >