My New Job - Softcover

Wagner, Catherine

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1934200263 ISBN 13: 9781934200261

Publisher: Fence Books, 2009

Synopsis

"In My New Job 'The women step out, the men go in' and the edifice C. Wagner's made seems an increasingly wider and wider kind of turning—colossal and somatic—through her own body and the bodies of others. Cathy's Job is a joyous multiple. It's a lift."—Eileen Myles

About this title

About the Author

Poet Catherine Wagner was born to military parents in Burma and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. Wagner is a graduate of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop, and the University of Utah's Ph.D in Literature program. She is Assistant Professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.

From Publishers Weekly

Wagner's third collection is conversational and filled with the kind of self-consciousness that acknowledges and draws the reader in: I'm lying down with myself and kissing myself.... I thought, you all might enjoy that,/and the honester I get, the/creepier I'll be. Beginning with a section of Exercises, Wagner (Macular Hole) fixates on the body (the joint will stay in place like a pearl in Vaseline), and everyday pain: Ah good the left shoulder hurts again/because the right shoulder was, and is the wrong one. Branching into sexuality, there is fantasy and fixation, but also demystification (well I expect you to go into the/ fucking human tunnel/ I'm going) and mockery: penis regis, penis immediate, penis/ tremendous, penis offend us. Though she is an experimental writer and takes comfort in ambiguity (it abstracted me, which was salvation), these poems are not impenetrable. There is a fascination with the ordinary—the apt not mine & the carpet's not my fault/ I love that—that keeps the collection grounded and candid. Wagner is obsessed, in a good way, with the idea that things mean, and I can't tell them not to. (Nov.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Fence Books
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1934200263
• ISBN 13: 9781934200261
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 114