Bewilderness
Bewilderness explores urban and suburban wildernesses--threshold places--in a darkly comedic, surreal set of prose poems. In Bewilderness, urban and suburban landscapes come to life as shape-shifting places, enchanted places, mundane places of magical thinking, as the reader explores the heterotopias of playgrounds and backyards, lakefront parks, splintery subdivisions, and semi-industrial wastelands. Creatures that inhabit these edged-out corners of land take on the features and neuroses of their human co-habitants in poems that are direct, declarative missives with offbeat instructions for navigating and inhabiting these liminal worlds.
Catherine Black is an Associate Professor at OCAD University, where she was a co-founder of the Creative Writing BFA program. She has published two collections of prose poetry: Lessons of Chaos and Disaster, and Pat Lowther Award-nominated Bewilderness. Her lyric nonfiction novella, A Hard Gold Threadwas nominated for the ReLit Award. This is her first novel.
