Catherine Barnett (born 1960 in San Francisco) is an American poet and educator. She is the author of Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced, winner of the 2003 Beatrice Hawley Award. Her most recent collection, The Game of Boxes (2012), received the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets. Her other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship. She has published widely in journals and magazines including the Washington Post, Barrow Street, Shenandoah, Pleiades, the Iowa Review, Gulf Coast, the Hat, and the Massachusetts Review. Barnett is an instructor at New York University and Teachers & Writers Collaborative. As poet-in-residence at the Children’s Museum of Manhattan, she teaches writing to young mothers in New York City’s shelter system. She also works as an independent editor and recently collaborated with the composer Richard Einhorn on the libretto for "The Origin," his multimedia oratorio about the life of Charles Darwin. In addition, she is a member of the Alice James Books Cooperative Board. She received her BA from Princeton University and an MFA from Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers.
-
Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are PiercedPoemsFrom"Ritual"
In his bath my son looks half-
drowned,
lying so still,
his hair a scarf of weed,
his eyes closed,
and only the water breathing.
He practices
in his porcelain bed
his resting,
rehearsing
until the water takes cold
and he shivers a little against it.
Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced:Poems -
Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are PiercedPoemsFrom"Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced"
We unstrung necklaces into two glass bowls
and passed them round to the mourners.
The beads were onyx, agate, quartz, all manner
of stone. Everyone was to take two
and at the end of the service
put one back in my sister’s hands.
What could she do but collect
the round weights all night?
She has not restrung them,
not wanting to be finished yet with death.
Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced:Poems -
Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are PiercedPoemsFrom"Pitch and Black Lift"
Where my father’s hip was rejoined
his leg lost an inch or two.
His right shoe is a ladder,
a shadow under him,
a hearse of black rubber he can’t escape.
He stands before the shoemaker
in his old bare feet
shaking off sadness,
a boy shaking pebbles out of his shoe.
Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced:Poems
"Though the poems in the long-awaited second collection from Barnett are only a handful of lines each, they are deceptively sophisticated. . . . Barnett's emotions are so potent they become something you could choke on: 'He's a lozenge of smut,' she writes, with the acute, straightforward vulnerability that makes these poems brave." —Publishers Weekly, starred review [on The Game of Boxes]
"[Barnett] negotiates the varied paths of love and, with a wry eye, looks for the meaning of life lurking in every corner. . . . Barnett plays the game of Hangman backwards, removing everything but the essential and surprising us with rhyme, turn of phrase and idea and image. . . . Highly recommended." —Library Journal [on The Game of Boxes]
“Catherine Barnett’s indelible first book, Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced, has a long fore-life and comes to us as a work of full maturity. . . . Barnett’s poems are scrupulously restrained and beautifully made, though the speaker in them is at times wild and even crazed with feeling, unappeased by sorrow.” —Edward Hirsch, The Washington Post
Selected Works
- Print Books
- Bookshop
