Streetlamp Nautilus

<p>Catharine Batsios is a brilliant observer of broken and discarded things which being from Flint and Detroit is a blessing. <em>Streetlamp Nautilus</em> is filled with decay but a type of decay that creates its own light. The streets in these poems only seem vacant if you don't know how to look. In reality they are teeming with life and afterlife including haunted objects memories and living things who prefer the shadows. Under Batsios' careful watch the slightest gesture (unnoticed by most) is worthy of a Greek tragedy. A piece of fruit can be an act of love even if its pleasures are fleeting. A blazing first book from a Michigan poet to watch.</p><p></p><p>                                              -Christine Kanownik author of <em>Head </em>and <em>Blood Bath</em></p><p></p><p></p><p>Cat Batsios is that rare rustbelt poet who writes against nostalgia. She loves the places she's from namely Flint and Detroit but she doesn't romanticize the mechanized industrial work those towns are known for. Our inheritance these poems argue is a shared humanity not a set of prescribed tasks that leave us spiritually civically and ecologically bereft. Who else could empathize with the plights of Sisyphus Atlas and Prometheus while sleeping on the back bench of a beat-up Buick between shifts at the family restaurant and reading Sophocles by flashlight?</p><p></p><p>From the kitchen to the basement / there are 26 steps / one for each letter of the Latin alphabet /24 for Greek / if you skip the two that are rotting she writes. Batsios moves her words around the page like an '82 Century weaving in and out of lanes on I-475 or like Olson's hangnail stanzas in Maximus. It's the kind of unromantic place-based projective verse we've been awaiting quite a while and she's only getting started.</p><p></p><p>-Cal Freeman author of <em>The Weather of Our Names</em></p><p></p><p></p><p>Catharine Batsios's poems verb down the street <em>where the pavement is strung like a strand of prayer flags</em><em> </em>unveiling our cities in a new light a signature <em>Streetlamp</em> <em>Nautilus </em>darkness. There is caffeine in the coffee a poet in the poetry. Not the silence of the 3am coffee-jitters but the sound. Listen up reader. We're alive. Or something much fleshier rockier viscous winged. Something I'm grateful this poet shaped into seeing.</p><p></p><p>                                               -Elijah Sparkman author of <em>Five Stories</em></p>