Oracle: Poems

by Cate Marvin

Overview

A witty and elegiac new collection from the author of "exhilarating, fierce [and] powerful” verse (Robert Pinsky, Washington Post).

The speakers of Oracle occupy the outer-borough cityscape of New York's Staten Island, where they move through worlds glittering with refuse and peopled by ghosts—of a dead lover, of a friend lost to suicide, of a dog with glistening eyes. Marvin's haunting, passionate poems explore themes of loss, of the vulnerability of womanhood in a world hostile to it, and of the fraught, strangely compelling landscape of adolescence.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393353136
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	07/12/2016
Series:	Movie Tie-In Editions
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Cate Marvin is the author of Fragment of the Head of a Queen and World's Tallest Disaster. A winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Prize and a Whiting Award, her poetry has been published in the Paris Review, Poetry, Tin House, and elsewhere. A cofounder of VIDA and a professor of English at CUNY, she lives in Maplewood, New Jersey.

Editorial Reviews

"Channels the colorful voices of Staten Island."

Vanity Fair

"These are poems of feeling, memory, and calamity, of a life lived near the edge and an edge that nevertheless always resolves itself into a haunting ethical music. This is a wonderful collection of poems. It makes a powerful claim on the reader at every turn, on every page."

Eavan Boland

"Poems finely tuned . . . full of inventive echoes and spring-loaded syntax."

Dialogist

"Intense and intimate."

Rumpus

"She takes no prisoners."

NPR

02/16/2015
Marvin (Fragment of the Head of a Queen) has produced a collection—her third—of spectral, charged poems: a wild, ferocious bunch capable of emotional darkness, bound by a strong poetic I. As Marvin writes, “If the town had one huge umbrella, we might all join/ to carry it above us together. But there is no together.” This realization provides the freedom to explore different angles on tragedy, loss, and vulnerability, with Marvin weaving vivid, uncanny lines amid narrative, confessional poems that attempt to shed light on various forms of violence (physical, sexual, emotional) against women. The goal is virtuous, even if some of the poems fall flat in the process. Still, it’s a successful call to arms, an urgent plea to express the self in the midst of constant hurt and tragedy. Poetry, with its crucially intangible value, is the weapon of choice. “What am I coming to poetry for?” she asks herself. “Make something no one can use that/ no one wants. Don’t ask why. It builds character.” This character building, perhaps, is the best possible response to a violent and challenging universe. And of course, she pulls no punches: “We need more cold sores, need more of what you/ won’t give us; give us some true ugliness.” (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

03/15/2015
In this follow-up to Fragment of the Head of a Queen, Kate Tufts Discovery Award winner Marvin offers recognizable scenes while writing dense, emotionally thick verse that will challenge some readers. The poems pulse with urgency ("Glasses forever itch in/ cupboards to be filled with wine as mouths in dark/ plot to be kissed), anger ("Walking very quickly makes it quite impossible/ To note the lousy perfection of stars"), aggression ("I was meaner than a flimsy dollar the change machine/ refuses"), a spooky capturing of the moment ("Then the tarry hot of the parking/ lot rose up, black, promising me any boy's face bent to crack/ against my face that was becoming a face"), and bitter—or perhaps cynical—despair ("If the town had one huge umbrella, we might all join/ to carry it above us together. But there is no together"). Taken individually, these moments can be powerfully affecting; taken together, they can drown out one another or sometimes not quite work. VERDICT An intriguing, emotionally biting, sometimes overwritten work that's not wholly successful but will interest serious readers of poetry. —Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Library Journal