Catherine Theis

Biographical note:  Born in 1977 in New York, Catherine Theis grew up outside Chicago and spent her summers in Sicily with her family. She attended the University of Vermont where she received a Rubin Writer Award which allowed her to take graduate courses in creative writing at Hollins University. While in college, she studied at the University of Padua, Italy, and received a Buckham Scholarship Award to study at the University at Kent in England.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844718795
ISBN:  9781844718795
Author:  Catherine Theis
Title:  The Fraud of Good Sleep
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  DCF
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Nov-11
Extent:  84pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  5 mm
Weight:  126 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 9.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  The Fraud of Good Sleep is a book of “serious humanist” poems. Theis’s poems combine a stunning, classical rigor with a passionate madness that is utterly contemporary and surprising. From prose poems and extended lyric sequences to translations and fragments, this book attempts to enfold the living past into the insane present.

Main description:  The Fraud of Good Sleep is a book of “serious humanist” poems. Theis’s poems combine a stunning, classical rigor with a passionate madness that is utterly contemporary and surprising. Charting the magic arc of a modern love story on a banjo string or through birch-white epistles left behind at a deserted campsite, these poems engage in the oblivion of snow, intoxicants, and broken-heartedness since living includes loving where “destruction be our lot.” It’s a place where fortunes are told: “Degenerate fruit and burned apple wood. / The impure equals the fertile plain.” From prose poems and extended lyric sequences to translations and fragments, this book attempts to enfold the living past into the insane present. Or, what you might call “the wild hunt to baptize the dead.”

Table of contents:
Contents
Pacific
Basia Mille
To Sweets (FRENTIC):
Pilgrim
Book of You: Read My Lips
Unlived
Priamel
Martial 
Time for Now
The Mock Florida Lectures
At the Corner of Chestnut and Fourth
The Phainetai (He Seems to Me) Fragment
The Fraud of Good Sleep
My First Valentine
Direction
Heads or Tails
Blood in the Food in the Belly
Paradise Sauna
Banjo Tune
The Possibility of a Sacred Wood
Duchampian Eyes on the Metal-Made Chair
No Small Smell
Remedies
Irene
Provisions
Kent
Compliance
Intimacy
Notes

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Excerpt from book:  

The Possibility of a Sacred Wood

I held it—
whatever it was, and the rotted plant stems
rotted out some more until
the sky broke with attitude
and all the old plant debris flew up,
out of my hands, disappearing on a wind
suddenly present, a thunder squall passing into sense.
The light reflected in the window, white
with honey cuts of red. 
I hear a train passing, its whistle attractive.
I turn my face when the train passes—
ways to capture light—where we are.
The music beginning and ending without effort.

Unpublished endorsement:  With The Fraud of Good Sleep, Catherine Theis gives us poetry as sensuous, glinting energy. Swerving between the intimate and the adamant, these poems feel like letters written to you by someone who’s in love with the world—someone whose eyes and heart are wide open, who’s learned (and keeps learning) from the ancients, who can mingle her voice with Sappho’s and smile wickedly at Dante. There are musings on cities and foods (“Who will bring the chocolates weather permitting?”), mock lectures, disarming wisdom (“Fidelity, the sea we share in peaceful times”), and exhortations to live—to live well. “My concern,” writes Theis, “is with circumference, many-faceted / crystal wine glasses, Roman aqueducts, all sorts / of highway thinking.” These are poems flashing with wonder and humor, but “roughed in sorrow,” hard-won in their realizations. They are full of the bright ache of being alive.

Joanna Klink

Unpublished endorsement:  Catherine Theis’s The Fraud of Good Sleep is a riotous and refined celebration of language. It is elegant and erudite without ever being stuffy, and surprising at every turn. A truly dashing collection, full of glitter, and everywhere intimating the “joy in the mountains very near.”

Maggie Nelson