Danger Days

by Catherine Pierce

Overview

The poems in Catherine Pierce’s new Danger Days celebrate our planet while also bearing witness to its collapse. In poems steeped deep in the 21st century, Pierce weaves superblooms and Legos, gun violence and ghosts, glaciers and contaminant masks, urging us to look closely at both the horror and beauty of our world. As Pierce writes in “Planet,” “I’m trying to see this place even as I’m walking through it.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781947817203
Publisher:	Saturnalia Books
Publication date:	10/15/2020
Pages:	88
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 7.40(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Catherine Pierce is the author of The Tornado Is the World, The Girls of Peculiar, and Famous Last Words. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. An NEA fellow and Pushcart Prize winner, she co-directs the creative writing program at Mississippi State University.

Table of Contents

Anthropocene Pastoral 3

In Which the Country Is an Abandoned Amusement Park 4

Prayer 5

High Dangerous 7

In Praise of the Horror Movie 9

The Guilt Depot 11

Pillow Talk 12

Inheritance 14

How Becoming a Mother Is Like Space Travel 16

Strategies for Mothers in the Age of This Age 18

Good Morning 20

Here in the Future We Are Always Watching Ourselves 22

Entreaty 25

Tunnel Vision 27

All 21 of Mississippi's Beaches Are Closed Because of Toxic Algae 29

What We Invented 31

I Spend My Days Putting Away, 33

Spaceship Earth 35

Quiver 39

Let Someone Say You Are Electric 41

From The Compendium of Romantic Words: Howl 43

From The Compendium of Romantic Words: Whip-Smart 44

From The Compendium of Romantic Words: Delicatessen 45

From The Compendium of Romantic Words: Undone 46

Instructive Fable for the Daughter I Don't Have 47

In Early Motherhood I Lay Down Like a Cat Each Night, 48

Gestational Size Equivalency Chart 49

Exhausted with a Three-Week-Old, I Make a Quilt of My Near-Hallucinations 51

Love Poem with Planetary Wonders and Loose Definition 53

Enough 56

Abecedarian for the Dangerous Animals 58

Tether Me 59

The Mysteries 60

Chadwick Lake, 8:15 a.m. 62

Poem for Quicksand 64

I Kept Getting Books About Birds 65

Dear Place, I Ask So Much 67

Fable for the Final Days 71

Please Let It Be Aliens 73

On the Issue of Lunar Trash 75

Shell Game 77

Alternative Facts 78

Poem Written After the Supreme Court Confirmation Vote 80

Danger Days 82

Let Me Try to Explain My Nights 84

Poem for the Woods 86

All of This Building 88

Poem for Right Now 90

Vespers 92

Ail the Dead Animals 94

Everything Mattered/Matters/Will Matter 96

We Live in the Most Exquisite Terrarium 99

Work 100

Planet 102

Editorial Reviews

"Danger Days boldly confronts political and ecological collapse head-on—and shows us that poetry has the ability both to chronicle and battle back the apocalypse, with brilliantly rendered moments of beauty, wonder, love, and sly humor. Pierce takes on lockdown drills, spiders, violent storms, carcinogens, toxic algae blooms, tender-age shelters, retreating glaciers, horror movies, dangerous animals and even quicksand—and weaves them into luminous odes to humanity and domesticity in the Anthropocene, giving us a way to muddle through. 'Darling,' she writes, 'here is a sky polluted / with our city. Kiss me under it.'"—Erika Meitner

From the Publisher