Full Description
In Nervous Device, Catherine Wagner takes inspiration from William Blake's "bounding line" to explore the poem as a body at the intersection between poet and audience. Using this as a figure for sexual, political and economic interactions, Wagner's poems shift between seductive lyricism and brash fragmentation as they negotiate the failure of human connection in the twilight of American empire. Intellectually informed, yet insistent on their objecthood, Wagner's poems express a self-conscious skepticism even as they maintain an optimistically charged eroticism.
"Wagner's fourth collection contains poems of memory and dark artifice. She writes with an obscure, magnetic lens. . . . Wagner contrasts these complicated poems with short, clean, pieces that offer a kind of breathing space for the reader. Not to be mistaken for trivial, the linguistic tightness of these poems are highlights of Wagner's collection."—Publishers Weekly
"Taking with one hand what they give with the other, Wagner's poems are full of vehemence and disdain and tenderness and somewhere, in some inexpugnable part of the body of language through which so many discomforting feelings pass, a thorny kind of joy. This is my idea of great poetry: in which 'The actual is / flickering a binary / between word and not-word.'"—Barry Schwabsky, Hyperallergic
"Nervous Device is such a smart book. You never know where the poems are going to take you, or when some startling, often cringe-making image or thought will intrude. Unable to settle into a comfortable rhetorical space, these poems reject simple claims to knowing something or doing right or changing the world. Rather, they move like an erratic insect stuck in a language bell jar. Brilliant, and disturbing."—Jennifer Moxley
"Nervous Device, the human machine, palpitating inside its own little bounding lines. These poems do everything the human device does, vibrating like an electrified tornado inside a glass jar, and make this reader profoundly alive to huge swathes of being. There is no machine for mastering the self (yet), but there are Cathy Wagner's poems."—Eleni Sikelianos
"The poems in Nervous Device resonate with a knowing nod to time and the difficulty and struggle of being sentient and intimate—of loving while being human. This is poetry connectivty: sexy, poignant, knowing. And the poems here make me feel possible."—Hoa Nguyen
"Wagner's poems contain multitudes, at once overflowing with seductive lyricism only to suddenly shift into brash fragmentation. She is informed, but the word subjective has no place whatsoever in her work. As the cover suggests, the potential for human connection is downright erotic for Wagner."Alexis Coe, SF Weekly
"The notion that the audience is 'putting [their] finger in [her] vagina' while reading Nervous Device signals one of Wagner's primary thematic concerns in the collection: the complex relationship between poetry, sex, desire, and the body."—Joshua Ware
"Wagner is to be lauded, first and foremost, for her daring, her conceptual eclecticism, and her linguistic range. . . . Nervous Device is a clear-eyed and brave testament to the changing currents of a poet's life."—Seth Abramson, The Huffington Post
" . . . the manner in which Wagner structures the language through repetitive dialogue both builds meaning and breaks it apart. . . . Wagner balances disjunction and lucidity, private and public, distant and (riskily) up-close."—Jessica Comola, HTML Giant
Contents
INFRARES 3
PRESSED GO 5
A WELL IS A MINE: A GOOD BELONGS TO ME 6
IF 8
RAIN COG 9
INNOCENT MONEY 10
A PATTERN 11
RECENT MALE INTERVENTION 12
CAPITULATION TO THE TOTAL POEM 13
PLEASURE TRIP 14
NEVER MIND 18
VERSUS 19
RAIN COG 20
RAIN COG 21
BLINK WHOLE HEAD IN IDENTIFICATORY TRANCE 22
THE AUTONOMY OF ART HAS ITS ORIGINS IN THE CONCEALMENT OF LABOR 24
FLY DOME 25
A ROSE FOR GEORGE 26
MAKE A MACHINE FOR MASTERING SELF 28
HAPPILY 29
FLIES, POND 30
SPELL 31
ANOTHER HUMAN MADE ME COME 32
I AM WAITING FOR LANGUAGE 33
REGARDING THE USE-VALUE AND EXCHANGE-VALUE OF ORGASMS, WITH A LIST OF ORGASM ANALOGUES 34
BENEFITS OF METAPHOR 36
AIR ENVELOPE 37
A LANDSCAPE 38
CHICKEN 39
THE SUN-WENT-DOWN CALAMITY 40
ROTTEN PLACE FOR CURRENCY TO GROW 41
I PRONOMIAL 42
DO FAIRLY PLEASANT THING 43
THE UGLY NECK, OR MAKING BANK 44
INFRA RES: COLOR ESSAYS 45
The light was out of my face 46
Kinds of light: 47
I made clean lines ferment 48
Red flies toward eye 49
Whence this yellow page? 50
And we return to the question of the integration of color. 51
Color, says Albers, 52
The sun-red hair 53
THE BOUNDING LINE 54
