Equipoise: Poems

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In her second book of poems, Kathleen Halme delivers an irresistible erotics of ocean. Based in fact on the North Carolina coastline, the climate of these poems is one abundant with sun, salt water, and the paradoxical shore. Halme braves happiness despite contemporary trends of cyicism and despair.

SYNOPSIS

Sarabande Books announces the February 1999 release of Bad Judgment, Cathleen Calberts second collection of poems. Calbert offers feminist fables appropriate to the millennium: tales of when the world lost meaning, of falling in love in an age of indeterminacy. Her sense of comic absurdity is uncanny: in one poem, the speaker attends a costume party as a dead debutante; in another, facile positivism is shredded by satire.

In poems that balance realistic and surrealistic narratives, irony and sentiment, Calbert records the journey of a woman reeling from a number of lossesher youth, the death of a close friend, religious faithtoward love and marriage. These poems speak directly of and from the self, and in so doing echo Whitmans conversational grace. Calbert writes an updated feminist song of herself, a song that celebrates the pleasure of being the modern woman as wild card, as other/than wife, mother, lover, friend, the woman who delights in forging herself with wit and wisdom.

The title poem, Bad Judgment, shows how the little lies we tell ourselves and others can create lives of bad faith, and as much as she would like to be consoled for her losses, reassured about the permanence of her recompenses, Calbert does not seek the easy balm of dogma. Instead of grace or God, per se, she suggests, we have perspective. And Calbert shows that we are blessed, in our quest for simplifying principles, to discover the exceptional.

Cathleen Calbert is the author of one previous collection of poetry, Lessons in Space, published by the University Press of Florida in 1997. She was a recipient of The Nation Discovery Prize in 1991, the Gordon Barber Memorial Award of The Poetry Society of America in 1994, and a writing fellowship from The Rhode Island State Council for the Arts in 1995. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 1995, Feminist Studies, The Hudson Review, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where she is an Associate Professor at Rhode Island College.

Between Dont try anything! and Shell try anything! fall (or rise: depending on her mood) Cathy Calberts startling new poems, so cool, so speculative, so disabused, so warm. Our colloquial twist has it rightwhen its good and sharp, shapely and tough, we call it bad: bad mouth, bad ass, bad judgment!

FROM THE CRITICS

New York Times Book Review

The collection builds beautifully, subtly changing shape. . . . Calberts poems are wrought from straightforward, serviceable language with the occasional welcome curlicue, and most have an easy narrative drive. Many of them are about tentatively yearning for love but hoping not to have to admit it; others are about finding it and realizing how fragile and valuable it is.

ForeWord

Award-winner and author of Lessons in Space (1997), Cathleen Calberts newest anthology reveals a spectrum of emotions; from . . . poems of loss and longing in My Dead Boyfriend and Bad Judgment to Lunatic Snow, which is contemplative and leaves one with a smile. Calbert takes everyday real experiences and combines them with a surrealistic tone to create a very deep, thought-provoking experience for the reader. . . . This collection of Calberts poetry would be a wonderful addition for high school classrooms as well as for the avid poetry connoisseur.

The Boston Sunday Globe

In her tour-de-force second book of poems, Calbert is a poet deliciously out on a limb. . . . She is brilliant, acrobatic, swooping above, around, and below. . . . Calberts strength is in her merciless, inescapable voicereminiscent in some ways of Sylivia Plath or Anne Sextonand the furious, focused ways she uses the first person to tell stories. In Bad Judgment, Cathleen Calbert dazzles, wounds, and delights.

Colorado Springs Independent

Her language is precise and a little bit rowdy. These are street-smart poems dealing with what it means to be humanto win a few, lose a few, and survive it all. Bad Judgment is good poetry.

Ploughshares

Calberts second book . . . is a searching, sometimes seething look at the traditions of love and marriage, revealing a strong voice adept in the use of irony. . . . With an elegance reminiscent of Whitman, these poems celebrate the singer as vigorously as they do the song. The result: lyrics that are witty, cynical, sharp-edged, stunning. . . . Part of the pleasure of reading Calberts poetry is watching her play: with language, with sound, with tradition, with the reader. Bad Judgment? Hardly. This is a wise book: sexy, witty, irreverent, and filled with moments of brilliance, carefully crafted by a poet who loves the sweet suck of consenting molecules so much she cant help revealing the comic absurdity and beauty of the resulting collisions.Read all 9 "From The Critics" >

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Can heartlessness harbor anything besides itself, you ask? Then as you read these poems you discover what a great, despairing compassion underlies Cathleen Calberts view of our rotten world. These are truly extraordinary poems. — Hayden Carruth