Cate Marvin uses language the way a gymnast uses her body; she is a
formalist who has thoroughly learned the pleasures and gains of abandon.
But it is her excursions into wild image and passionate song that win
the reader's heart. The heart is central in World's Tallest Disaster,
which is essentially a book of love poems--love lost and found, love
requited, love abandoned and betrayed. What Cate Marvin has done in her
remarkably assured and powerful first collection is to remind us in
fresh terms of the news that stays news: that our desire is Not a sea of
longing, // but the brack of wanting what's physical/ to help us forget
we are physical.
Violently passionate and firmly symmetrical, like tango or the blues,
these poems-at first-are about sexual passion. . . . But in the great
tradition of love poetry, these poems don't stop with love. They move
from eros to imagination. Or they thrash between the two. . . . This is
an encouraging book in the context of American poetry's fashions or
factions, because it evades categories. [Marvin's] is an urgent as
well as an artful voice.--from the Foreword by Robert Pinsky
Marketing Plans o Author tour in Ohio, Kentucky, and NYC
o Brochure and postcard mailings
o Advertisements in key literary and trade magazines
Book tour dates including:
o Cincinnati
o Louisville
o New York City
Cate Marvin was born in Washington, D.C. She received her B.A. from
Marlboro College in Vermont, and holds two M.F.A.s: one from the
University of Houston in poetry, the other from the Iowa Writers'
Workshop in fiction. She has been awarded scholarships to attend both
Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers' Conferences. Her poems have appeared in
such magazines as New England Review, The Antioch Review, The Paris
Review, The Georgia Review, and Ploughshares, among others. She is
lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in English
at the university there.
