Wonderama

from “Gnomon”

Softly lit in a murk of amniotic dust, the only two faces in the hallway of Saint Ag’s School:
a clock with its echoing voice and shifty hands, and a girl, in a cloud of perplexity
and distinction: the only third-grader who cannot learn to tell time.
Told to return only when she can name the hour, she watches the red hand
hiccup around the track, and the longer black one skip forward, click by click,
and the shorter black one, like her, not do much at all. Teachers lean from their doorways
to witness her fecklessness, then turn, like the painted figures in cuckoo clocks, to vanish
into the movements of their classrooms. She’s as likely to grasp the time as to knit a sock.

from “Condemned”

While Peggy draws John Lennon on the wall, I print, in magic marker
on the ceiling, a poem I love about poppies and the dead. Mary cracks black walnuts
with a rock, and feeds the pieces to our sister Judy, who pries the rusted lid
from a can of house paint so she and Tommy can camouflage their beds.

In the kitchen, our happy mother plays Nelson Eddy so loud that it drowns out
the screams of the couple upstairs. She is the reason, she tells us, why we are so smart,
and smarts you can’t buy, or we’d sell ours and get a TV.

from “JC and Me in the Summer of ’64”

Catholicism and puberty duked it out the summer my body
broke out of its corral and galloped Paterson’s streets
in search of sugar through the new and luscious grasses
of impure thought.

The priest I confessed to dismissed me as overly scrupulous—
I was thinking too much about thinking of dirty things—
and, distracted because the word scrupulous started with screw,
I left with a head full of sin and two Holy Cards, which he passed
me as if they were discards in Holy Strip Poker, a game I imagined
instructive and entertaining.

When William Carlos Williams wrote “Memory is a kind of accomplishment,” who knew he was writing about Cat Doty and her long-awaited second book of poems? From the mean streets of mid-century Paterson where she is accosted by an inexperienced mugger and the weekly confessional which she leaves with a “head full of sin and two Holy Cards” to the temple of the boardwalk arcade, Doty’s “accomplishment” takes us on a hurricane-in-a-whirling-teacup rush that is both alarming and beautiful. I found myself reading these poems so many times, I swear, I thought my eyes rubbed the ink off the pages.|—Peter Murphy, Founder of Murphy Writing of Stockton University

In Catherine Doty’s poetry the lyric gift and the comic gift are so finely interfused that you can turn a poem inside out and not expose a single seam. Over and over in her poems, these two rarest of gifts react, and produce the mysterious virtue called style. In Doty’s first book of magic, Momentum, I thought I was just being sledded too fast to see how it was done. Now we have this Wonderama, with its more relaxed texture and magisterial tempos—and I still can’t see how it’s done. But that is a wonder for the way home. For the most and best of this book’s wonders, just open the gate and walk through.
—Robert Carnevale

Catherine Doty’s Wonderama delves gloriously into the shame-filled mess of searing poverty and finds wonder there in the absurdity of human meanness, our stupidity, frailty, madness, and kindness. Doty drops us directly inside childhood experience without sentimentality. Despairing as they sometimes are, these are not poems of despair. She’s not looking toward heaven to justify the suffering of the people in these poems. She knows they can’t afford such luxury. Instead, with compassion, humor, and often astonishingly beautiful imagery, Doty invites us to stay right here, rooted to the earth with her and them. We’re grateful for the invitation.
—Martin Jude Farawell, director of the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, author of Odd Boy

80 pages
Catherine Doty
Pub date – February 2, 2021
Trade paper – 6 X 9″
$18
ISBN 978-1-933880-82-2
Florenz Eisman Memorial Series