In her highly anticipated second volume, Fragment of the Head of a Queen, Cate Marvin fulfills the promise of her prize-winning first, World's Tallest Disaster. Mythic without the need to lean on a myth, the book operates according to the principle that if there is to be resurrection, it must be preceded by destruction. The speakers in these poems are bound by a need to know what has happened. What they find is by turns beautiful, frightening, and darkly, wildly humorous. Fans of the first volume will find plenty of Marvin's wrought music, unblinking focus, and hard-edged sensuality, but here the poems are wreathed with an entirely different silence. The brokenness and loss of the fragmented queen-seeming to rise up through centuries-is their tutelary spirit. What are we to do when experience hands our idealism back to us in pieces? Her answer: Let the pieces sing.

Read

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LOVE THE CONTAGION

Quest the contagion, funnel much muck
through your hands upraised and cupped,
pour river-brack down your throat, pick
your scabs with loving glee. Love your

master of pestilence, conqueror of white
clothes: mud prints, paw prints, germs
not even the physician knows. Eat through
a muskrat's lair, divine the grub's slumber

beneath rotting leaves, take the lot, crush
it in your bare hands. Look at the moon
for its holes, narrow your eye at its skin
until you find its pores, squint your eyes

at the filthy sun and run toward the flavor
factory where the cherry stench hangs
above the highway, the machines that cast
that bright net of scent into the polluted air:

its mix of chemical so thick your breath
trips as if you're inhaling jello. Lap at its
stickiness, run your rough hands through
your own gnarled hair. Repel the lover,

cast his grace at broken ground. Wear
your lover's indiscretions like stickpins
in your apple hat: rotting skin, dry as dust,
ample-sliced, a great old pie atop your head!

Be the world. Do not deny our fascination
lies in its filth, the maggot's sweet diet.
Marvel at the corrupt! Make disgust your
lust and cast your fresh pain to the trash!


FRAGMENT OF THE HEAD OF A QUEEN

I.

Gesture

Have you known the roar of an estranging city,
freeways braided round the head's dome, traffic
a throbbing wound to the ear, you have seen
genderless ancients wade through mild rivulets
of shadow that pass beneath overpasses, pick
through peelings of houses, finding gold only
in the yellowed rinds shucked from oranges.
As they sift for treasure shed from our rooms,
I fall to love a thought: my ghastly head raised.
But this species of story makes of one a servant.
Have you known the roar of an estranging city,
is only another way of saying, I was defeated.

II.

Translation

Behold your head, a hive the bear's pawed down
from its bough, smashed to ground for sweetness,
honey leaking a yellow jasper. Its furious center
dispelled, now all of you is leaving. This is how
the self turns on self, goes vagabond, this is how
you are repaid for your industry. Their domicile
dismantled, thoughts now roam the air like aimless
troops, seeking recompense in the sticky jewels
of an empty soda can, crawl into its lip's sweet
keyhole, cannot make their way back out the dark.
I would have made for them a freedom song, if
the teller of this story had only a slave's loyalty.

III.

Rupture

Once, to gaze was to taste an eye's persimmon,
a true fruit shucked from its skin with a glance.
The very manner her mouth gave way to display
the white seeds of teeth was flesh, too permissive.
A thumb pressed hard to her cheek left its petal.
Irises, twin grapes, too ripe with light, raptured
to be plucked, stomped, bottled. Had we left her
to froth and ferment, she might have drank herself.
Or is it merely that beauty reciprocates violence.
One becomes indentured to a story's riddle.
Loved overmuch, she preferred to be loathed.
It comforts us to believe this is what she chose.

Blurbs

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Cutting-edge second collection from the 2000 Kathryn A. Morton Prizewinner

Visit Cate Marvin's homepage at www.catemarvin.com

Fragment of the Head of a Queen won the 2008 Helen C. Smith Memorial Award for Best Book of Poetry given by Texas Institute of Letters.

"Cate Marvin's aptly titled second collection bristles with lyricism and with the intellectual and emotional contradictions that face single women of this time. Always inventive, unafraid of spilling the beans, Marvin can make you laugh at crying and cry at laughing, yet few works so rife with satire ever took the human condition more seriously. Such poetry comes not only of stylistic choices, but of real lives and real hearts in nervous transition. It is well-made, heartfelt, and cool in its restlessness. Even at its most composed, it flashes with temper, merging the metaphysical and the dramatic, and arriving at unpredictable resolutions that seem not so much aesthetically risky as vitally necessary. Fragment of the Head of a Queen makes it clear why Cate Marvin is becoming one of our essential poets.

—Rodney Jones

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