Wonderama

“In Catherine Doty’s poetry the lyric gift and the comic gift are so finely interfused that you can turn a poem inside out and not expose a single seam. Over and over in her poems, these two rarest of gifts react, and produce the mysterious virtue called style. In Doty’s first book of magic, momentum, I thought I was just being sledded too fast to see how it was done. Now we have this—Wonderama, with its relaxed texture and magisterial tempos—and I still can’t see how it’s done. But that is a wonder for the way home. For the most and best of this book’s wonders, just open the gate and walk through.”

“When William Carlos Williams wrote ‘Memory is a kind of accomplishment,’ who knew he was writing about Catherine Doty and her long-awaited second book of poems? From the mean streets of midcentury Paterson, where she is accosted by an inexperienced mugger, and the weekly confessional which she leaves with a ‘head full of sin and two Holy Cards,’ to the temple of the boardwalk arcade, Doty takes us on a hurricane-in-a-whirling-teacup rush that is both alarming and beautiful. I found myself reading these poems so many times, I swear, I thought my eyes rubbed the ink off the pages.”

“Wonderama delves gloriously into the shame-filled mess of searing poverty, and finds wonder there, in the absurdity of human meanness, our stupidity, frailty, madness, and kindness. Doty drops us directly inside childhood experience without sentimentality. Despairing as they sometimes are, these are not poems of despair. She’s not looking toward heaven to justify the suffering of the people in these poems. She knows they can’t afford such luxury. Instead, with compassion, humor and often astonishingly beautiful imagery, Doty invites us to stay right here, rooted to the earth with her and them. We’re grateful for the invitation.”

"Catherine Doty’s pitiless poems beautifully show us what we don’t want to see: children’s poverty, abuse, neglect. And their meanness. Poor children living in squalor, which Doty’s language often veils in lyrical glamor."