Catechesis: A Postpastoral (Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry) - Softcover

“Lusby’s shivery sequence strews a trail of gems through fairy tale’s shadiest, most iconic location―the Forest. We meet our heroine in very unfortunate medias res―under the axe―but which way will fortune tilt? As each lyric spills its elixir, a swarm of dialogue and diagrams, allusions and images cluster like corpse-fauna, rise. Catechesis reminds us that every occult canon, every sweet herbarium is a library of poisons, and invites us to drink deep.”
―Joyelle McSweeney, author of The Red Bird and The Commandrine and Other Poems

“Both raw and beautiful in its rendering of terrors, Catechesis reforms moments of gendered violence into moments of transformation, in a dynamic illustration of Adrienne Rich’s feminist tenet that ‘her wounds came from the same source as her power.’ Lusby’s language is like the ‘flint-strike of tooth on light,’ and this book is ‘such lungspan,/ such bright palpitation’ from beginning to end.”
—Sara Eliza Johnson, author of Bone Map

"Lindsay Lusby takes fairytales and horror movies and twists these stories into utterly new creations. Here the Brothers Grimm’s 'Maiden without hands' is a girl who elusively 'prefers to imagine herself a bird' and asserts 'An unhanded bird / is still a bird, / is still worth its weight in breadcrumbs.' Time and again Lusby splinters off from language’s predictable paths: 'If a felled girl falls in a forest, / does it sound // inevitable?' In her collages, as in her poems, there are no barriers between humans, animals, and their environment, which results in eerie butterflies with bones and plants sprouting tooth-blossoms."
—Matthea Harvey, author of If the Tabloids Are True What Are You?

 

“I find myself so deeply impressed by this book, that I’m a bit speechless. Lusby’s work is both gruesome and lovely. It’s like following a butterfly off of a cliff and then just staring up at the sky as you confront the grim reality that you’re falling to your death. The raw horror and beauty of the pieces of Catechesis are heartrending. This is one of the best poetry books that I’ve read, ever.”
—Jessica Drake-Thomas, This Week I Read.com