Saturnalia Books | IPG (March 2012)

Paperback. Later Printing.
Signed on title page.

As new.

In Catherine Pierce’s most peculiar second collection, we enter a world of longing and destruction, of death and rebirth, and of wonderfully odd girls—girls who read too much, who drink too much or not enough, who craft necklaces from earwigs and wring nostalgia from Spiro Agnew. These are poems of questions and restlessness, but also of answers of a sort. As Beth Ann Fennelly writes, “[t]he big themes here—self identity, desire, escape—are illuminated with clarity, scored musically, and enlivened with wit. The Girls of Peculiar is a fabulous book.”

Catherine Pierce is the author of The Tornado Is the World and The Girls of Peculiar, both winners of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Prize, and of Famous Last Words, winner of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, the New York Times, American Poetry Review, The Nation, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, and elsewhere. An NEA Fellow and two-time Pushcart Prize winner, she is Professor of English at Mississippi State University, where she co-directs the creative writing program.