World's Tallest Disaster
By Cate Marvin

Winner of the 2000 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry

Recipient of the 2002 Kate Tufts Discovery Award
Finalist of the 2002 Natalie Ornish Poetry Award from Texas Institute of Letters
Recipient of the 2001 Greenwall Fund Grant from Academy of American Poets 2002 Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award, Runner-up
2001 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry Nominee

"Violently passionate and firmly symmetrical, like tango or the blues, these poems—at first—are about sexual passion. . . . But in the tradition of love poetry, these poems don't stop with love. They move from eros to imagination. Or they thrash between the two. . . . This is an encouraging book in the context of American poetry's fashions or factions, because it evades categories. [Marvin's] is an urgent as well as an artful voice."

—From the Foreword by Robert Pinsky

"Cate Marvin's unswerving subject is how, as men and women, we afflict each other and ourselves. Her poems craftily destroy romantic stereotypes and speak back to the disasters we create. They speak with an anquished irony, enraged lyricism, and a dark hope. There is something both very old and very new in this brash, canny, and utterly authentic book."

—Edward Hirsch

"The 'bittersweet Eros'—as another poet calls him—speaks here again, this time through Cate Marvin's poems, and does so in a fresh, beautiful, convincing way."

—Adam Zagajewski

Cate Marvin uses language the way a gymnast uses her body. Reading her poems, we are awed by the display of extraordinary strength and balance, the brave, disciplined play between the forces of gravity and the human desire for weightlessness. Marvin's poems are jaunty and fierce, witty and intense; she reads like a formalist who has thoroughly learned the pleasures and gains of abandon.

But it is her excursions into wild image and passionate song that win the reader's heart. The heart is central in World's Tallest Disaster, which is essentially a book of love poems—love lost and found, love requited, love abandoned and betrayed. An ancient form, the love poem has never been easy to write, and in our postmodern age the difficulty has only increased. Marvin is of her time—her strong, definitive voice has the sound and feel of the present moment, and includes a canny irony.

"Before I go let me thank the man who mugs you...," her poem "On Parting" begins, and then proceeds to gratefully enumerate the awful things she wishes for her ex-lover. The poem ends with these lines: "No thanks//to the skin forgetting the hands it welcomed, your/ hands refusing to recall what they happened upon./ How blessed is the body you move in--how gone." The bittersweet tone illustrates Marvin's ability to allow the coexistence in her poems of wry aggression, and simple grief for loss of the beloved.

In World's Tallest Disaster the affairs of the heart are of course metaphors for all human complexity and loss, just as they were in the very first love poems. What Cate Marvin has done in her remarkably assured and powerful first collection is to remind us in fresh terms of the news that stays news: that our desire's "Not a sea of longing,// but the brack of wanting what's physical/ to help us forget we are physical."

Cate Marvin was born in Washington, D.C. She holds MFA degrees from the Universities of Houston and Iowa and a Ph.D. from the University of Cincinnati. Her first collection of poetry, World’s Tallest Disaster (Sarabande Books, 2001) won the 2000 Kathryn A. Morton Prize and the 2002 Kate Tufts Discover Award. It was described by Publishers Weekly as a “taut, defiant, confessional collection” and by Ploughshares as a “spectacular debut.” Along with the poet Michael Dumanis, she co-edited the groundbreaking anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande Books, 2006). She teaches in the low-residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Lesley University and is an associate professor in English at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York.