Writers Recommend

Collection: The Girls of Peculiar

Author: Catherine Pierce

Excerpt:

The first few stanzas from “Fire Blight”:

You’re sixteen. You carry a camera—a real one,

you’re learning words like aperture and F-stop.

You’re sixteen. You’ve stopped brushing your hair,

and would like someone to ask why you’ve stopped

brushing your hair. You’re thinking of dyeing

the tangles plum. You’re thinking of. You’re sixteen.

Last year you weighed more. This year you’re as tall

as you’ll get, and there’s a boy whose eyes are poisoned

marbles. You’ve photographed him again and again

but you can’t get the poison right. You’re sixteen.

You say this again and again but you can’t believe it.

In Bio, your friend shows you her bruised stomach.

We didn’t use a condom, she whispers, so I was careful.

You blink. Down the rabbit hole...

Recommended by:

Anna Journey, author of the collection, If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting (University of Georgia Press, 2009), selected by Thomas Lux for the National Poetry Series.

Stated simply:

The “girls of peculiar” in Catherine Pierce’s second poetry collection hail from a variety of strange and mythic places: the spooky recesses of personal history (a recurring purple-haired high school self), the cliques of adolescence (“the delinquent girls,” “the geek girls,” “the drama girls”), the realm of fairytale (the wicked daughter, the children lost in the woods), the pages of literature (Heidi, Caddy, Nancy Drew), the province of iconography (Eve, the Virgin Mary), the superstitions of old wives, and—perhaps most unusually—the dimensions of imagined “alternate” selves who lip synch and swagger from the past and future alike. Pierce approaches her subjects with a kind of self-mocking humor and theatricality more akin to the aesthetic tendencies of the Gurlesque poets than the Confessional writers. The manifold selves ventriloquized in The Girls of Peculiar hallucinate from their high school desks and perform the teenie-bopper voodoo of magazines like YM (such as “the trick of lemons”), often shape-shifting between the ironic masks of camp and the grotesque.