All posts tagged: Catherine Wing

Catherine Wing: “Self-Medication”

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I hate New Year’s Day. There’s something dull and numb about it—beyond the hangover—that never fails to feel disheartening. Some years ago, when I was still lucky enough to be living in Seattle, my writing group proposed to meet on New Year’s Day as an antidote to the annual drear. Even if we had no new work to share we would at least write something and fend off the prevailing sense of the wasted day. So on January 1, 2008, we were somewhere in our pre-writing preamble when my good friend Ariana mentioned that she had decided not to drink for a while. Now, Ariana is no heavy drinker, quite far from it, and she went on to explain that she was doing so to remind herself where her edges were—because alcohol, it seemed to her, is a kind of situational softener, and she wanted to be reminded of her sharper aspects. By which she meant her more difficult—edgier—self. The poem “Self-Medication” was born entirely from this idea. What are we at our edges and …

Old Masters, Neglected Masters, Non-Masters, and Gems

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For Dust Thou Art by Timothy Liu Southern Illinois University Press, 2005. $14.95 No bland heterosexist suburban poems of backyard sparrows here, Timothy Liu’s latest book, For Dust Thou Art, offers a smorgasbord of impudent isms: onanism, terrorism, “jism,” and solipsism. Titillating perhaps, but stick to the salad bar. The book’s title from Genesis 3:19 misleadingly window dresses a store of randy words, from “good head easier to get than a vintage Merlot” from the first section of the book to “linen falling off our laps as boytoys bathe” from the last section of the book. They sandwich some unsurprising poems in the middle that fetishize 9/11—“A fireman’s boot / exhumed at last—strange trophy / from rubble still too hot to touch” or “Every possible pleasure to be indulged for the world was at an end.” The middle section’s mediocrity begs the question: what of the failure of any poet so far to achieve a “Wasteland” from 9/11? While these poems may stimulate, they fail to surprise, much less catalyze new understanding of people and …