Cate Marvin is the author of two acclaimed books of poetry: World’s Tallest Disaster, which won the 2000 Kathryn A. Morton Prize and the 2002 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Fragment of the Head of a Queen, both published by Sarabande Books. She also co-edited, with Michael Dumanis, the anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century. In 2008 she received a Whiting Award. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry, Ploughshares, Slate, Fence, and Boston Review. Marvin attended the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa and the University of Houston. She teaches in the low-residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Lesley University and is an associate professor in English at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York.

I LIVE WHERE THE LEAVES ARE POINTED
at my head and my heart, knife-tips green
in a gasoline-doused garden. From the tire
store behind the house, leering mechanics
glaze my window with saliva. I sit at the end
of the couch and point my finger angrily,
wag it in the face of forever. I sit back on
my haunches and sniff the air. Please note:
the earth is no less sulfur than usual. It’s not
nothing I’m waiting for, not as if there’s no
reason I’ve done my hair at last. If I weren’t
waiting, why would I be so impatient?
I don’t drink whiskey to relax.
And there is someone I wouldn’t mind seeing
dead. But when I comb my hair and stay
up all night, it’s not as if I’m trying to meet
someone. The days can travel without me.
The landlord can mow the lawn in shifts,
his pink face an obscene balloon caught
by the noose of his collar—I’ll sleep through
the motor. And you can bet my dreams bloom
stranger than hallucination. I take my life
like this. Poems grow from my skull while
vines creep the tire store wall: slowly, certainly.
When they made soap, they had me in mind.

“Cate Marvin’s aptly titled second collection bristles with lyricism and with the intellectual and emotional contradictions that face single women of this time. Always inventive, unafraid of spilling the beans, Marvin can make you laugh at crying and cry at laughing, yet few works so rife with satire ever took the human condition more seriously. Such poetry comes not only of stylistic choices, but of real lives and real hearts in nervous transition. It is well-made, heartfelt, and cool in its restlessness. Even at its most composed, it flashes with temper, merging the metaphysical and the dramatic, and arriving at unpredictable resolutions that seem not so much aesthetically risky as vitally necessary. Fragment of the Head of a Queen makes it clear why Cate Marvin is becoming one of our essential poets.”

—Rodney Jones

“A keen new poetic voice blessed by Robert Pinsky in a praiseful foreword, she fashions elegant poems that pull quietly but fiercely in opposite emotional directions as the narrator, skeptical of desire, ponders men—large, mute beings with unfathomable eyes and untrustworthy hands—and animates hungry, insomniac, and flinty women (“We walk / in pants, but live in bodies termed feminine”), by turns enthralled and disgusted. Wreathed in smoke and stoked with whiskey, Marvin’s poetic personae are lunar in their brightness and brooding, gazing out moodily on landscapes steeped in centuries’ worth of poets’ tropes and heartaches. The body is at odds with itself and with the mind, and men and women come together only to pull apart. Marvin snaps crisp metaphors onto the page like winning hands in poker, taking no comfort in victory, however, counting instead on panache, carefully wrapped anger, and precise expression to carry her through.”

—Booklist