Event Horizon
With poems that contemplate the everyday―errands, gardening, dog walks―or confront the white-body supremacy of local sunbathers, Cate Marvin reckons with the hurt of our patriarchal world, facing her own past, toxic relationships and pondering what we can gain by leaving some loved-ones behind.
Her brilliant fourth poetry collection exists just outside of calamity. Set between the violent realm of patriarchy and the bright otherworld of female agency and survival, these are poems of pointed humor and quick intellect, radical exposure and (re)vision. At Marvin’s table, the knife of domesticity becomes a threat, sharpened and shined. Misogyny pulls the sheets from the bed; motherhood wails from the backseat of the car; our hero is ghosted (abandoned, haunted) by past friends and beloveds. Event Horizon asks, at what point do we disappear into our experiences? How do we come out on the other side?
Cate Marvin earned an MFA in poetry from the University of Houston and an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop before completing a PhD in English and comparative literature at the University of Cincinnati. Marvin’s first book, World’s Tallest Disaster earned the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. A Guggenheim Fellow and co-founder of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, Marvin is Professor of English at the College of Staten Island and also teaches poetry in the Stonecoast MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine. She lives in Scarborough, Maine.
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