Cecilia woloch the ghost hunter

  • Self-pity stinks, my mother says and says, You should see me naked now.
  • This is a first collection that is flush with life, and that carries full cycles of joy and sorrow and mystery in its heart, and reveals a poet who has already.
  • Caitlin's work appears in the 2009 edition of the Best New Poets series, an annual anthology of fifty poems by emerging writers.

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    There are those poets whose mastery is so inspiring that one feels a need to cease writing verse themselves lest the master comes across a slovenly stanza one has written and commence to laugh deeply, richly at the grammatical incompetence. Paranoia, I know, but that's the feeling I get sometimes after reading the poems of Thomas Lux. The ease with which he's able to merge plain speaking with unaffected turns of phrase, dark irony with darker humor, hard realism with lyric sweeps which make me pause in my own work and consider the next line I'll write harder than I normally would. Great poets inspire that. Lux is one of my favorite poets--I can't think of anyone else who crafts a free verse poem with better care and intriguing twists of perception that he does., He is exactly the poet people should read when they want more from comprehensible poems than Billy Collins' unceasing tours of his neighborhood. Lux is the Laureate of Unintended Results. He will show you how matters invad

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    News & Highlights

    Caitlin has been selected for the Emerging Poet Feature Series at 32 Poems Magazine. The feature includes an introduction to her poetry, an interview, and a new poem. About Caitlin’s work, the magazine’s Associate Editor writes:

    “Doyle’s poems are deeply attentive to the valences of meaning and sound in each word, giving them almost magical power. Upon repeated readings, they flower. It is as if Blake’sSongs of Innocence and Experiencehave been braided together, so that the child cannot escape the looming dark, just as the adult remains lulled by the sounds that first ordered their world.”

    Caitlin’s interview with Pulitzer Prize winning poet Paul Muldoon appears in Issue 16.2 of Literary Matters. They discuss the role of voice in poetry, the problem of cultural determinism in the context of a writer’s national identity, the importance of not getting in a poem’s way, and more. To read the interview, you can

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    Self-Pity Poem by Cecilia Woloch

    So few birds I know bygd name—
    bluejay, cardinal, sparrow, crow,
    pigeon and pigeon and pigeon again.
    This morning I woke to the thump
    of soft breast, frantic wings against glass—
    female robin, I thought, confused,
    mistaking her own reflection
    for some other, enemy bird;
    launching herself from the limb
    of the dying tree outside my window
    toward the ghost limb—there; not there.
    My sister calls all birds suicidal.
    Our mother sits in her big green chair,
    too weary, even, to talk on the phone.
    All afternoon it's rained and rained—
    all the damp world weeping, so I've thought.
    Self-pity stinks, my mother says
    and says, You should see me naked now.
    Her body a map of the broken world
    through which I slipped, and my sister, once.
    Well, I would eat ash if I thought
    it could bring back the dead,
    or my own youth, or anyone's.
    Nothing gets done around here, we complain,
    but I've learned a few trees by heart:
    Here is my sycamore, Mother, Sister,
    here is the branch

  • cecilia woloch the ghost hunter