The Catenary Press

2015-11-10T07:24:00.002-08:00

The Catenary Press is pleased to announce the release of Micah Bateman's Polis.

Polis
Micah Bateman
5 1/4" x 7"
$8

from Polis

Poor things, didn't they plan for bad weather?
Already the sky widens its aperture.
Rain streams from the clouds as light through a lens, ill
Knowledge ends in capture.

Recidivist sky, repeat offender
Entering her old
Pattern off a sentence
One almost wouldn't live through —
Rights are never read, and the wind remains silent, except
Through all this weather we've been having,
En masse, as records are
Released to the sound of glaciers calving.

Do not enter.
Everyone you love will enter.
Press the button that says, Do not enter, which
Opens the door through which to enter
The classroom, the market, the war to enter.

2015-11-10T07:22:00.000-08:00

The Catenary Press is pleased to announce the release of Jessica Laser's Assumed Knowledge and the Knowledge Assumed from Experience.

Assumed Knowledge and the Knowledge Assumed from Experience
Jessica Laser
5 1/4" x 7"
SOLD OUT

from Assumed Knowledge and the Knowledge Assumed from Experience

Does life feel funny to you?
It does to me.
I'm chasing the good.
That's a feeling.
A promise.
Does it come to you?
It does to me to say so, not the good
Which is better.
Can I still care about your concerns?
I am concerned by what concerns are.
Are they yours?
Are you surprised?
Discerning people come through that door.
I said something you'd understand
So you'd see them
And understand it
And it was at the edge of your understanding.
You're describing the language you're using instead of the room.
—The baby enters.
People speak as they shouldn't.
They shouldn't be ashamed.

Jessica Laser received an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writer's Workshop. She has taught writing at Brown University, The University of Iowa, Purchase College, and The New School. Her poems can be found in Boston Review, The Iowa Review, Lana Turner, jubilat, and elsewhere. Visit her at JessicaLaser.com.

2014-03-02T20:32:00.002-08:00

The Catenary Press is pleased to announce the release of Heather Tone's Gestures.

Gestures
Heather Tone
5 1/4" x 7"
$8

from Gestures

As for me, I own a few things, one of which is a gathering of muscles. I put my left foot down. I put my right.

I gestured to the cave, and it said it housed a goddess, or something close to it.

I gestured to the goddess. Her voice sounded like dried leaves, flaked paint. It blew off the mountain.

I had been seeking advice. I didn’t know what to do.

“You know how many Things I/ could do without. Things I could/ do.”

Some courtships are conducted largely through letters.

Heather Tone received her MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa. Her poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Fence, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Florida.

2013-11-11T07:58:00.001-08:00

The Catenary Press is pleased to announce the release of Alice Notley's Secret I D.

Secret I D
Alice Notley
5 1/4" x 7"

TELL ONE THE LANGUAGE

I write for those who don’t read my poems.

Somehow you read them

Because I’m inside your secret I D

Tell me, tell me what to say

The language breaks, Momma

On the way to the pink landscape and

Johnny’s

Taking the other road. I’ll never daunce

the boockles off ma shoes

The most erotic song in the language

is still Greensleeves

Are there any couples on the Ark or only

word dust

I’m tellin ya

I wanted you to love us more. Why

if I’m givin you my

Whole self Savior We want of you to

sing to us the new,

Sing it hitting it any ole way

As has or hasn’t been. In any

fair tense

Will there be lives in the future This

is the future Is it a life No A song.

No though I can sing it

I write for those who will never

read my poems

This is the language of the apocalypse

tender and humorous

as doves or crows or omicrons

No one has ever loved you more And

that’s the new

That I’m in you in the new Apocalypse

in your nonfragile I Ds

-->

TELL

Alice Notley is the author of over twenty five books of poetry. Mysteries of Small Houses (1998) won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and her collection Disobedience (2001) was awarded the Griffin International Poetry Prize. Notley’s recent work includes From the Beginning (2004), Alma, or the Dead Women (2006), Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970-2005), which received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, In the Pines (2007), Culture of One (2011), and Songs and Stories of the Ghouls (2011). In addition, she edited and wrote the introduction for the reissue of Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets (2000), as well as editing, with her sons, The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (2005). Her honors and awards include an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has also been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has lived in Paris since 1992.

2013-03-18T17:38:00.002-07:00

The Catenary Press is pleased to announce the release of Jennifer Moxley's Foyer States.

Foyer States
Jennifer Moxley
5 1/4" x 7"

Boundless, boundless and undone. Must we be served
From ourselves to sing with the voices of others?
Dismembered by discord: the patterned static of a
Thousand machines speeding through the darkness.

Beneath the hum the gentle strum of a tensed musical
Interval, a repeated ascending arpeggio. Can you hear it
Making its bid to bring the harmony back? The rhetoric
Drowns it. The credentials deaden it. The song will not

Stand before a board of experts. What do they know?
Nothing of what the lion knows, nothing of the chorus
Of touch sung in obedience to stellar logics, orders more
Vast than these small circles confining us with hollow discipline...

-from The Various Silences Lie In Shadow

Poet Jennifer Moxley's collections include: Clampdown, The Line, Often Capital, The Sense Record, and Imagination Verses. In addition to her books of poetry she has published a memoir, a volume of essays, and three books of translation from the French. Though a California native, she now lives in Maine with her husband, scholar Steve Evans, and her cat Odette.

2012-10-22T09:36:00.001-07:00

The Catenary Press is pleased to announce the release of Margaret Ross's Decay Constant.

Decay Constant
Margaret Ross
6"x9"
$8

from Decay Constant

Did you know

what piece to save? I couldn’t see to. Did you

see anything light up that wasn’t sunlit? You weren’t

supposed to watch the choreography for pleasure, it was

developed as ‘a science of behavior towards

others,’ strict exemplary manners

that the audience might live as if they lived

in Italy or France. En pointe, the girls were

tangent to the ground by one toe only, even

that one plinthed on wood and numb

to ever sharper stages of a pain interpreted

as stairs you used to elevate yourself. She carried

vials of it in her pocket home and kept

it in her desk because she thought it

beautiful, the mild blue specimen resembling

a flame’s pale eye gemmed cool and steeping the dark

air of her room in washes that betrayed

no injury or effort save for skill

describing grace so that we knew

from the way the dancer raised her arm

how far her country was.

Margaret Ross received her MFA from the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop. Her poems have appeared, or are forthcoming in Boston Review, Claudius App, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere.

2012-06-13T11:08:00.001-07:00

The Catenary Press is pleased to announce the release of Robyn Schiff's Novel Influenza.

Novel Influenza

Robyn Schiff

6"x9"

$8

from NURSERY FURNITURE

Today I am expecting a new chair.

I returned four this year

already. They were all Sand

with Sand piping and come from

a shop called The Land of Nod, where Alison

the manager who deals with me

gave me a gift certificate I am afraid

to redeem. Wary of what dream?

Nod does mean sleep,

but only as a pun on the state Cain

fled to after slaying

Abel—a waking sleep part

denial, part self righteous,

a neutralizing hallucination of

North Carolina I rock in-

to inhaling the off-gassing batting, bare heels

rhythmically worrying a loose

staple behind

the rigid skirt at chair-bottom where coarse

temporary fiber

as permeable as loose

landscape fabric partitions

against interior interior where

an involuting spring grinds the

slow industrial rattle I recorded for

Alison and played back over

the telephone.

Robyn Schiff is the author of Revolver (2008) and Worth (2002), both from the University of Iowa Press. She is a professor at the University of Iowa and co-edits Canarium Books.

2012-04-15T19:01:00.007-07:00

We are pleased to announce the forthcoming publication (summer, 2012) of chapbooks by Margaret Ross and Robyn Schiff.

More details to follow!

2011-03-31T15:43:00.001-07:00

The Catenary Press is pleased to announce the release of Hannah Sanghee Park's Ode Days Ode.

Ode Days Ode
Hannah Sanghee Park
5"x8.5"
$7
SOLD OUT

Excerpt from Ode Days Ode

BLACK THURSDAY

...has far to go

The nerve to lean, and land a holy kiss:
a move of Judas—holy as the (quote)
“eternal winter” Blake wrote of that Thurs-
day. What is holy? What were wholly notes
for poems, what was love? We watched the lines
the sea threw off and knew our faith. And think
of faith, its ghosting through a crash—the time
we choose to close our eyes—when we will drink
whatever's placed in front of us—within
the cup is wine or blood: we choose. To scoff,
expected, but the world, it stretches in
a way to make the taste of wine seem off.
I think, you'd say, your tastebuds need a rinse.
I lie alone. Another day begins.

Hannah Sanghee Park was born in 1986.

2009-07-25T11:49:00.000-07:00

The Catenary Press is pleased to announce the release of Elisabeth Benjamin's The Houses.

The Houses
Elisabeth Benjamin
4.5"x7.25"
$9

SOLD OUT

Excerpt from The Houses

House for Z

On the porch, a new bee landed on one half of the halved pear, which wept bright juice into a white saucer. The woman chose this occupied half, then slowly, carefully ate around the bee. But when it left, she devoured the fruit with the severity of a flame.

She is quickly everything.

Elisabeth Benjamin lives on the coast of Maine's Cobscook Bay, where the icy waters appear to boil.

***

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