The Catenary Press is pleased to announce the release of Micah Bateman's Polis.


Polis
Micah Bateman
5 1/4" x 7"
$8







from Polis

Poor things, didn't they plan for bad weather?
Already the sky widens its aperture.
Rain streams from the clouds as light through a lens, ill
Knowledge ends in capture.



Recidivist sky, repeat offender
Entering her old
Pattern off a sentence
One almost wouldn't live through — 
Rights are never read, and the wind remains silent, except
Through all this weather we've been having,
En masse, as records are
Released to the sound of glaciers calving.



Do not enter.
Everyone you love will enter.
Press the button that says, Do not enter, which
Opens the door through which to enter
The classroom, the market, the war to enter.

The Catenary Press is pleased to announce the release of Jessica Laser's Assumed Knowledge and the Knowledge Assumed from Experience.
Assumed Knowledge and the Knowledge Assumed from Experience
Jessica Laser
5 1/4" x 7"
SOLD OUT


from Assumed Knowledge and the Knowledge Assumed from Experience

Does life feel funny to you?
It does to me.
I'm chasing the good.
That's a feeling.
A promise.
Does it come to you?
It does to me to say so, not the good
Which is better.
Can I still care about your concerns?
I am concerned by what concerns are.
Are they yours?
Are you surprised?
Discerning people come through that door.
I said something you'd understand
So you'd see them
And understand it
And it was at the edge of your understanding.
You're describing the language you're using instead of the room.
The baby enters.
People speak as they shouldn't.
They shouldn't be ashamed.


Jessica Laser received an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writer's Workshop. She has taught writing at Brown University, The University of Iowa, Purchase College, and The New School. Her poems can be found in Boston Review, The Iowa Review, Lana Turner, jubilat, and elsewhere. Visit her at JessicaLaser.com.

The Catenary Press is pleased to announce the release of Heather Tone's Gestures.



Gestures
Heather Tone
5 1/4" x 7"
$8







from Gestures


As for me, I own a few things, one of which is a gathering of muscles. I put my left foot down. I put my right. 

I gestured to the cave, and it said it housed a goddess, or something close to it.

I gestured to the goddess. Her voice sounded like dried leaves, flaked paint. It blew off the mountain. 

I had been seeking advice. I didn’t know what to do. 

“You know how many Things I/ could do without. Things I could/ do.”

Some courtships are conducted largely through letters.


Heather Tone received her MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa. Her poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Fence, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Florida.
The Catenary Press is pleased to announce the release of Alice Notley's Secret I D.



Secret I D
Alice Notley
5 1/4" x 7"

ONLINE SUPPLY: SOLD OUT

To purchase a copy of this title (and others) PLEASE VISIT OUR TABLE AT THE AWP BOOKFAIR in SEATTLE


 

TELL ONE THE LANGUAGE


I write for those who don’t read my poems.
Somehow you read them
            Because I’m inside your secret I D
Tell me, tell me what to say
            The language breaks, Momma
On the way to the pink landscape and
                                                       Johnny’s
Taking the other road.  I’ll never daunce
            the boockles off ma shoes
The most erotic song in the language
            is still Greensleeves
Are there any couples on the Ark or only
                                                        word dust
I’m tellin ya
I wanted you to love us more.  Why
            if I’m givin you my
Whole self Savior We want of you to
            sing to us the new,
Sing it     hitting it any ole way
As has or hasn’t been.  In any
            fair tense
Will there be lives in the future This
is the future Is it a life No A song.
            No    though I can sing it
I write for those who will never
            read my poems
This is the language of the apocalypse
            tender and humorous
as doves or crows or omicrons
No one has ever loved you more And
            that’s the new
That I’m in you in the new Apocalypse
            in your nonfragile I Ds
-->
TELL


Alice Notley is the author of over twenty five books of poetry. Mysteries of Small Houses (1998) won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and her collection Disobedience (2001) was awarded the Griffin International Poetry Prize. Notley’s recent work includes From the Beginning (2004), Alma, or the Dead Women (2006), Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970-2005), which received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, In the Pines (2007), Culture of One (2011), and Songs and Stories of the Ghouls (2011). In addition, she edited and wrote the introduction for the reissue of Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets (2000), as well as editing, with her sons, The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (2005). Her honors and awards include an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has also been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has lived in Paris since 1992.



The Catenary Press is pleased to announce the release of Jennifer Moxley's Foyer States.



















Foyer States
Jennifer Moxley
5 1/4" x 7"

SOLD OUT

Boundless, boundless and undone. Must we be served
From ourselves to sing with the voices of others?
Dismembered by discord: the patterned static of a
Thousand machines speeding through the darkness.

Beneath the hum the gentle strum of a tensed musical
Interval, a repeated ascending arpeggio. Can you hear it
Making its bid to bring the harmony back? The rhetoric
Drowns it. The credentials deaden it. The song will not

Stand before a board of experts. What do they know?
Nothing of what the lion knows, nothing of the chorus
Of touch sung in obedience to stellar logics, orders more
Vast than these small circles confining us with hollow discipline...

-from The Various Silences Lie In Shadow


Poet Jennifer Moxley's collections include: Clampdown, The Line, Often Capital, The Sense Record, and Imagination Verses. In addition to her books of poetry she has published a memoir, a volume of essays, and three books of translation from the French. Though a California native, she now lives in Maine with her husband, scholar Steve Evans, and her cat Odette.
The Catenary Press is pleased to announce the release of Margaret Ross's Decay Constant.


Decay Constant
Margaret Ross
6"x9"
$8

SOLD OUT


from Decay Constant
                         
                            Did you know

what piece to save? I couldn’t see to. Did you
see anything light up that wasn’t sunlit? You weren’t
supposed to watch the choreography for pleasure, it was
developed as ‘a science of behavior towards

others,’ strict exemplary manners
that the audience might live as if they lived
in Italy or France. En pointe, the girls were
tangent to the ground by one toe only, even

that one plinthed on wood and numb
to ever sharper stages of a pain interpreted
as stairs you used to elevate yourself. She carried
vials of it in her pocket home and kept

it in her desk because she thought it
beautiful, the mild blue specimen resembling
a flame’s pale eye gemmed cool and steeping the dark
air of her room in washes that betrayed

no injury or effort save for skill
describing grace so that we knew
from the way the dancer raised her arm
how far her country was.


Margaret Ross received her MFA from the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop. Her poems have appeared, or are forthcoming in Boston Review, Claudius App, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere.
The Catenary Press is pleased to announce the release of Robyn Schiff's Novel Influenza




Novel Influenza 
Robyn Schiff 
6"x9" 
$8


SOLD OUT


from NURSERY FURNITURE 

Today I am expecting a new chair.
I returned four this year
already. They were all Sand
with Sand piping and come from
a shop called The Land of Nod, where Alison
the manager who deals with me
gave me a gift certificate I am afraid
to redeem. Wary of what dream?
Nod does mean sleep,

but only as a pun on the state Cain
fled to after slaying
Abel—a waking sleep part
denial, part self righteous, 
a neutralizing hallucination of
North Carolina I rock in-
to inhaling the off-gassing batting, bare heels
rhythmically worrying a loose
staple behind

the rigid skirt at chair-bottom where coarse
temporary fiber
as permeable as loose
landscape fabric partitions
against interior interior where
an involuting spring grinds the
slow industrial rattle I recorded for
Alison and played back over
the telephone.

Robyn Schiff is the author of Revolver (2008) and Worth (2002), both from the University of Iowa Press. She is a professor at the University of Iowa and co-edits Canarium Books.