Miss America

CATHERINE WAGNER's work attacks from a primordial angle. Emerson, calling for a true American poet, said that language is a fossil record of poetry: every word was once a poem. If poetry is, therefore, some kind of life-animal, then Catherine Wagner's Miss America is a glorious beast. Her first book is cocksure and wailing, stinky, rude, and actually happening. Miss America is not self-thrilled by its (her?) own intentions and inventions, but running fast ahead of them. We have here the strangely visceral truths that fall from children's mistranslations, something undeniable slipped from the angry, drunk, or otherwise possessed. Wagner warns us of herself (and her propensity to invent words) right from the start. The opening poem of the book begins: "nigh said I made that up to / get some sweeteye from you all / some glance at me even if my / story is boring and a lie / . . . and who...cares they don't / want me to be likem and borem / everybody dead. / Since I been here SCARED / and my natural EBULLISHNESS / held back by a warning finger. / Mo lady! Poop it out!" Anyone who thinks this is babytalk should remember how we react when encountering a talking baby: fascinated and mesmerized. The further these nascent communications seem to be from "language," the closer they feel to an emotional core. Wagner's tongues, however, are never an escape from meaning. As she tell us in "Poem for Poets & Writers," "I like understanding so much I want it to happen over and over." Wagner is not just playing with the readymade materials of poetry, she is working from inner fiat: "Not here with joy but under pressure / from my superego" ("A Poem for Art in America," one of her "Magazine Poems"). On the contrary, this book does include joy (much of it, um, very natural). "I Am Darling You" begins "let me king around / you king all over, mighty" and continues, building gut-felt affection with mere words: "slavish all over me, please. // Darned mighty, sleeping, / oyster eyes. // Feel little. Little my head to sleep. // I suffer you, you basic." The final line of this poem, if read alone, would remain the merely prosaic: "He made enough for me to take to lunch." But the pressurized accumulations of off-phrased adoration force something miraculous into this final sentence. By the time the reader reaches the last line, each of its words tremor with the bursting love that speaks it. We suddenly experience the no-difference between correct and incorrect when human feeling overwhelms language. Wagner's yawps run from the clever/cultural ("If you are Gwyneth / You are never toenails on my rug / Abounding") to the crisis/existential. But, as we see in "Café Rouge," even the cerebrum's old complaints about its fetid meat-vehicle are freshly horrifying to Wagner's mind:Shoulderblades frayed the cloth I'm made ofSewn up my neck round speaking holeand ragged with snotpale salmon concealer soddenI pick and pick the seam all daydoes I really think anything covers me upt

I read Miss America and highly recommend it. This book is a cryptic marriage of teenage girl-speak ... with the structure of Jazz and I love it! Hints of narrative flash forward and back, in and out, revealing places which can be explored not by matching the beat but by investigating the spaces in between. Like & quote;Bitches Brew" it is a highly intelligent and layered work where images and stories interweave and lay on top of each other in a ferocious and often hilarious way. These are transportative poems-- interplanitary voyages where the visceral ... and the silly ... mingle. I think this book is great and hope more people enter and linger in Wagner's strange world.

Wagner's book has been compared to Jack Spicer's work and to the work of John Berryman. Both poets have clearly had an influence, but Wagner's poems are far more combative. I thought to say, put your hand in Wagner's book and she'll slap the tar out of you. That would be my blurb, and I mean it in the best way. Reading Miss America, you engage an intelligence -- much as if you were forced to really read a miss America rather than just look at her treats and snacks. The treats and snack are here, too, but you got to pay the lady her propers.

Wagner's poems are not for the common mind. Jack Spicer meets Anatole France and bomb's away. You've got to read these wild poems.

Catherine Wagner's iconoclastic poems cast a wide net over her witty critiques of contemporary public culture. From national anthems to irreverent folk songs to the staples of mainstream news magazines, Wagner's hauntingly, rhythmical voice redefines poetics and the nation with a sharp stroke of genius.