Wonderama: Poems

by Catherine Doty

Overview

Winner of the 2022 Paterson Poetry Prize, this coming-of-age collection is set in 1960s Paterson, New Jersey.

Wonderama is a collection of cinematic, surprising, and at times harrowing poems that capture 1960s Paterson, New Jersey, as experienced by the poorest, most vulnerable children living there. With candor, ferocity, and stunning imagery, Catherine Doty’s poems explore survival and loss in the life of a young girl escaping the perils of want, neglect, and abuse. At times both heartbreaking and vaudevillian, Doty’s work chronicles sexual awakening and assault, alcoholism, the hazards of Catholic school, and the complex consequences of coming of age in the inner city.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781933880822
Publisher:	CavanKerry Press
Publication date:	03/03/2021
Pages:	72
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Catherine Doty is a poet, cartoonist, and educator from Paterson, New Jersey. She is the author of momentum, also published by CavanKerry Press, and Just Kidding, a collection of cartoons.  

Table of Contents

I

Breathing Underwater 3

For Thomas Mosby 4

Sweet Ants 5

Tumbled 6

Grandma 7

The First Time I Was Told to Fuck Myself 8

Wonderama 10

The Dawn of Beauty 11

Behind Bars 12

II

What Does Not Kill Us 15

Half-Day Kindergarten 17

The Mikado, 1960 18

Catching 19

Gnomon 20

Standing, 1964 22

Touch 23

Easy-Bake 24

Larval 25

Migraine 26

Dirt Cellar 27

Riding the Maniac 28

III

Flag 31

Switch 32

Gorillas 33

At the Circus 35

Salesman 36

Federal Sweets & Biscuit, 1962 37

Shaman 38

IV

Dusk 41

New Girl in Town 42

Franny Takes Advice 43

Franny of the Jungle 44

Condemned 45

Hitter 47

V

Seaside Heights, 1964 51

Fun 52

Here, Boy 53

Sixteen, in the One Room That Locks 54

On Valley Road 55

Working Girls 56

JC and Me in the Summer of '64 57

Acknowledgments 61

Editorial Reviews

"Catherine Doty’s pitiless poems beautifully show us what we don’t want to see: children’s poverty, abuse, neglect. And their meanness. Poor children living in squalor, which Doty’s language often veils in lyrical glamor."

Vox Populi

Wonderama delves gloriously into the shame-filled mess of searing poverty, and finds wonder there, in the absurdity of human meanness, our stupidity, frailty, madness, and kindness. Doty drops us directly inside childhood experience without sentimentality. Despairing as they sometimes are, these are not poems of despair. She’s not looking toward heaven to justify the suffering of the people in these poems. She knows they can’t afford such luxury. Instead, with compassion, humor and often astonishingly beautiful imagery, Doty invites us to stay right here, rooted to the earth with her and them. We’re grateful for the invitation.

Martin Jude Farawell

In Catherine Doty’s poetry the lyric gift and the comic gift are so finely interfused that you can turn a poem inside out and not expose a single seam. Over and over in her poems, these two rarest of gifts react, and produce the mysterious virtue called style. In Doty’s first book of magic, momentum, I thought I was just being sledded too fast to see how it was done. Now we have this—Wonderama, with its relaxed texture and magisterial tempos—and I still can’t see how it’s done. But that is a wonder for the way home. For the most and best of this book’s wonders, just open the gate and walk through.

Robert Carnevale

When William Carlos Williams wrote ‘Memory is a kind of accomplishment,’ who knew he was writing about Catherine Doty and her long-awaited second book of poems? From the mean streets of midcentury Paterson, where she is accosted by an inexperienced mugger, and the weekly confessional which she leaves with a ‘head full of sin and two Holy Cards,’ to the temple of the boardwalk arcade, Doty takes us on a hurricane-in-a-whirling-teacup rush that is both alarming and beautiful. I found myself reading these poems so many times, I swear, I thought my eyes rubbed the ink off the pages.

founder of Murphy Writing of Stockton University Peter Murphy

Winner, 2022

Paterson Poetry Prize