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Second edition of the Woodford Reserve series in Kentucky Literature Read Wing's poetry at on the Poet's & Writers Website.
With Stevensian proliferations and Dickinsonian refractive speed, Enter Invisible puzzles without ruse, conveying a lightning-quick mind, always electric, fiercely inventive. The descriptive angularities, formal variance, and musical resources are sassy, tricky, and intriguing, full of razzle-dazzle and enormously beguiling, even as a tragic sense simmers within their marvelous contraptions. Catherine Wing is confident enough to entertain us and skilled enough to leave us haunted by what makes us laugh. —Dean Young
Constantly moving, Catherine Wing's debut collection wheels from oddball romance to satire, wicked comedy to subtle tragedy. Paying tribute to her predecessors, Wing incorporates the voices of Auden and Stevens into a poetic whirlwind: from princesses to life-science texts, birds to classified ads, kickapoos to the vaguely criminal Tom and Jerry. A student of the lattice structure of society and the universe, the particulars of building, whether it be a body or a definition, and the pull of the upright, knitting force, Wing weaves her poems together with sound and draws into the book her love of wonder, her interest in the difficult, the improbable, and the uneasy. In "Dear Snow," Sleeping Beauty ("Sleep") advises Snow White, "Bewilder awhile wild eye and well, / splinter the spindle into spine, ink and apple." A sinister litany, the Audenesque "Weight-Bearing Song" accuses: "You are the goose girl who shoulders the goose / You are the hangman who slipknots the noose." Wing is a denizen of the worlds inhabited by her poems; the verse is effortless. Interspersed throughout the collection are odd notes acting as rest stops, the Tom and Jerry series, and the comic classified ads. In "139 Words about Me," one brisk stanza reads: "Dear Iniquitous Villain: / Kick my tires. / ISO a synonym for nefarious. / No usuals." Aside from her gift for marrying sounds, Wing's great talent is for surprise; something waits toward the end of every poem. "Enter Invisible," the title poem and Shakespearean stage direction, is as much a command to the reader as the writer. This book is a classical theater replete with lights, curtains, and masks. The personal vignette is almost an absent form, and from this we better understand the writer herself: the collection runs from the head and declines entanglements of the heart. Do not expect sympathy here. Catherine Wing shows us the liberation of a silenced narrative. Her voice is as cool as moss.
Catherine Wing grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, on a street bounded by two florists, one cemetery, and a Carnegie library. She received a B.A. from Brown University and an M.F.A. from the University of Washington. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Chicago Review, Field, and Poetry. Enter Invisible is her debut collection.
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