World's Tallest Disaster, Cate Marvin
This is an encouraging book in the context of American poetry's fashions or faction, because it evades categories. More inventive than ploddingly narrative, more passionate than merely self-reflexive, these poems don't feel like they spring from any literal or figurative school, but from the kinds of knowledge and self-knowledge, evasion and rage, invoked by the volume's epigraph from Rilke. . . . This is an urgent as well as an artful voice.
Additional Info
Marvin's first book, World's Tallest Disaster, was awarded the 2000 Kathryn A. Morton Prize by Robert Pinksy (Sarabande 2001). In 2002, she received the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, Fence, Georgia Review, Slate, and The Kenyon Review. She is a creative writing professor at the College of Staten Island.