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    The Girls of Peculiar
    The Girls of Peculiar
    The Girls of Peculiar
    Ebook84 pages43 minutes

    The Girls of Peculiar

    By Catherine Pierce

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    About this ebook

    In Catherine Pierce’s most peculiar second collection, we enter a world of longing and destruction, of death and rebirth, and of wonderfully odd girls—girls who read too much, who drink too much or not enough, who craft necklaces from earwigs and wring nostalgia from Spiro Agnew. These are poems of questions and restlessness, but also of answers of a sort. As Beth Ann Fennelly writes, “[t]he big themes here—self identity, desire, escape—are illuminated with clarity, scored musically, and enlivened with wit. The Girls of Peculiar is a fabulous book.”
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSaturnalia Books
    Release dateMar 15, 2012
    ISBN9781617506185
    The Girls of Peculiar

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    • 5/5
      I plucked this small book of poetry off the shelf because I liked the title and the cover art. I liked these beautiful, strange poems about girls, identity, desire and the 70's. THE CHILD HAS READ EVERYTHINGAnd everything is haunted: the storybook where girlsin dirndls are devoured. Her mother's silver-spinedpaperbacks that heat her in dark places. The newspaperwith it's front page bloodied by the car crash. She can'tstop her eyes. She tries to forget what she's read, butlike that other story, once she's bitten in, she can't untaste.Her mind won't listen, veers off into the forest markedForbidden, holds a knife to her throat when she begs itto stop. For safety, she drinks her own guilt. It inoculates her.Everyone thinks she is the good daughter,her world a gold-leaf illustration. No one knowsthe words seed themselves in her brain. That they growand grow,their roots tangled, their limbs goblin-fingered.No one hears how they whisper, Think me. The wordsblacken and climb until she can't see past their spiny tops.Even as the world goes on real around her, she is shadowed.Sometimes light flickers above the clawed trees, and in itshe can make out people moving. They laugh like the dragonisn't always behind them. Like the limbs aren't fullof hanged children, swinging. Like they have neverwatched, horrified, their minds race over the landscapelike escaped hounds. She aches toward the people. But thenthe pages open again and she gorges herself to sickness.She doesn't want to find the path. She's the wicked daughter,the one who stays lost, and she'll learn that story by heart.She'll dwell in her own darkness, grow lizard-lidded,cat-limbed. She'll drink her evil down. She'll twist the treesinto every shape but the one that reads The End.

    Book preview

    The Girls of Peculiar - Catherine Pierce

    THE GIRLS OF PECULIAR

    Poems

    Catherine Pierce

    for my family

    © 2012 Catherine Pierce

    No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Please direct inquiries to:

    Saturnalia Books

    105 Woodside Rd.

    Ardmore, PA 19003

    info@saturnaliabooks.com

    ISBN: 978-0-9833686-2-5

    Library of Congress Control Number: 2011945980

    Book Design by Saturnalia Books

    Printing by Westcan Printing Group, Canada.

    Cover Art: Matt Haber, Delicate Rescue, 2010

    Photo credit: Megan Bean

    Distributed by:

    University Press of New England

    1 Court Street

    Lebanon, NH 03766

    800-421-1561

    Grateful acknowledgment is made to the publications where these poems first appeared, sometimes in different form.

    Acknowledgments

    Grateful acknowledgment is made to the publications where these poems first appeared, sometimes in different form.

    AGNI online: Firefly

    Anti-: She Considers Trading Her Secrets, Somewhere in the heap of minutes

    Bellingham Review: Everything an Amulet or Omen, Lamp, Virginity

    Blackbird: The Delinquent Girls, The Quiet Girls, The Drama Girls, The Geek Girls, She Gets Drunk and Talks Too Much at Her 20th Reunion

    Boston Review: Dear Day

    The Cincinnati Review: Dear Self I Might Have Been

    Copper Nickel: Oregon Trail, 5th Grade, The Sleeping Creature House

    Court Green: Postcards from Her Alternate Lives, The women from the ’70s are beautiful

    Crab Orchard Review: Reading YM at the Pool, Age 12, The Guidance Counselor to the Girl (The Guidance Counselor to the Girl also appeared on versedaily.com)

    diode: How It Ends: Three Cities, Train Safety Assembly, The ’70s Aren’t Coming Back, Scale, For This You Have No Reason, Because I’ll Never Swim in Every Ocean

    FIELD: Fire Blight, The Universe is a Madam, Without Ceremony

    Indiana Review: Dear Atom Bomb, Emergence

    Mid-American Review: A Catalogue of My Wants from Age 16 to the Present

    New Madrid: High School: A Triptych, Maryland, 1964, Postcards from Her Future Self

    Ninth Letter: Pennsylvania, 1961

    The Paris Review Daily: Hare-Lip

    Ploughshares: A Short Biography of the American People by City, The Books Fill Her Apartment Like Birds

    Slate: Reading Faulkner at 17, You Foresee Your Reckoning

    Sixth Finch: Poem to the Girls We Were, Poem from the Girls We Were

    Superstition Review: Narrative Theory

    Postcards from Her Alternate Lives also appears in The Best American Poetry 2011, edited by Kevin Young.

    I am grateful for a grant from the Mississippi Arts Commission that helped support the writing of this book.

    My sincere and serious thanks to the people who have helped to shape this book and the poems in it, in particular Brian Barker, Nicky Beer, Steve Gehrke, Becky Hagenston, Richard Lyons, Michael Kardos, and Maggie Smith. Thank you to Henry Israeli at Saturnalia Books. Thanks to my colleagues at Mississippi State University. Enormous thanks to my parents and sister for their unwavering support of what I do. And thank you, thank you, to Mike and to Sam, who fill every day with light.

    Table of Contents

    1.

    Poem to the Girls We Were

    The Delinquent Girls

    Oregon Trail, 5th Grade

    Dear Atom Bomb,

    The Quiet Girls

    The Child Has Read Everything

    Narrative Theory

    She Gets Drunk and Talks Too Much at Her 20th Reunion

    The Geek Girls

    Firefly

    Dear Self I Might Have Been,

    Train Safety Assembly

    The Drama Girls

    Poem from the Girls We

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