Gin & Bleach - Paperback

by Catherine Wing (Author)

My Reptile

Little frill d lizard

with your big mouth
and your clutch of egg.
Pure urge iguana
--I wanna wanna
wanna--heavy pet
in a moist habitat.
Your dewlap licks
down my spine;
your creep yearns,
yearns your crawl,
like a small machine
that you rev and
rev and rev until
the engine floods.

Gin and bleach: two clear liquids aiming for purity, bordering the toxic. Catherine Wing's poems are soaked in her cocktail, mixing doubt, loneliness, rough elbows, and razor focus. It riddles, aiming askew for a straight answer: how do we make our way through this world?

Author Biography

Catherine Wing's first book of poems, Enter Invisible, was the second title in Sarabande's Woodford Reserve Series in Kentucky Literature, and was nominated for a 2005 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2010 and such journals as Crazyhorse, Chicago Review, DIAGRAM, The New Republic, and Poetry. She grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, on a street bounded by two florists, one cemetery, and a Carnegie library. She currently teaches at Kent State University in Ohio.