Nervous Device
City Lights Spotlight Series No. 8
In Nervous Device, Catherine Wagner takes inspiration from Blake's "bounding line" to explore the poem as a body at the intersection between poet and audience. Using this as a figure for various sexual, political, and economic interactions, Wagner's poems shift between seductive lyricism and brash fragmentation as they negotiate the failure of human connection in the twilight of American empire.
Catherine Wagner was born in Burma to American military parents, afterwards living in the Philippines, Indonesia, Yemen and India before moving to the US. She received her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, studying with Jorie Graham, Donald Revell and Denis Johnson, and a PhD from the University of Utah. She is an Associate Professor of English at Miami University.
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