Seven Floors Up
Seven Floors Up
Poems by Cati Porter (Riverside, CA)
Mayapple Press, 2008
ISBN 978-0932412-676
Trade Paperback, 66pp; Retail Price $14.95
Cover art: Self Portrait as Big House by Julie Heffernan
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Pomegranate, Juiced
He tells me, Squeeze it. Like this, hands it to me,
cupping with my fingers, squeezing with my hand.
This squeezing into dew drinkable from the red cup
of itself, the leathery orb hand-like,
is like I’m squeezing his hand. I juice rubied knuckles
and tension’s released. He hands me a knife
to Pierce it. Right there. With it I tease the skin, open
a little wound. Put your mouth there-No. Give me your hand.
He shows me how to make it flow. I draw it in.
Good?, he asks. I answer not simply
about the fruit, about its juice. About the wanting.
About wanting his hands to me.
- From Seven Floors Up, forthcoming June 2008, Mayapple Press.
To read more sample poems from this collection click the “Poems” tab (above).
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Pre-sales are now being accepted. If you order before May 31, 2008, shipping is free. Books will ship the first week of June.
Currently available for order through my website; soon to be available for order through Amazon.com, the Mayapple Press website, or your local bookstore.
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Praise for Seven Floors Up:
As in some paranoic dream, in Cati Porter’s powerful debut collection, “everything’s a sign”—the scrabble tiles spelling out clandestine family tensions, the glazed eyes of porcelain lobsterware revealing her craftsman grandfather, the dictionary definitions of “mum” defining cycles of sexual violence and enforced silence. Through E-Bay ads for an inflatable church, labels stuck to her preschool son’s jeans, instructions for preconception gender selection, and childhood games, Porter names herself into the world with lyrical irony in poem after hilariously tragic poem. Follow her through the “bourbon-hinged jangling dancing open door” seven floors up to visit the kitchen of the soul. There are madwomen in that attic, but the booze is good, and they really know how to cook.
- Tony Barnstone, author of The Golem of Los Angeles, winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award for Poetry (Red Hen Press, 2008 )
Seven Floors Up you will find a complicated and gifted poet, Cati Porter, whose art is filled not only with heart and mind - but also with the body in its varied and rich incarnations. Here’s a poet speaking as wife, lover, mother, daughter, woman, artist and thinker, whose grateful, and still often rueful, poems remind us that it’s in our messy everyday entanglements, in our obligations and aspirations, amidst our fears and demons that we forge meaning. But don’t be fooled. Although these are the poems of a young wife and mother Porter has range. She can write “Marriage as a Board Game” and “Elegy for My Mothers (Who Are Not Dead)”, and then give us a sharp and insightful poem about an inflatable church available for purchase on eBay. She can write “In My Hand a Photograph Of Where He Is Not” with its compressed picture of loss and shock and then use a children’s game (”Mother May I”) to document the changing of the generational guard. Porter even turns her wry eye on the opportunities science provides - don’t miss “Oogenesis, Or ‘Welcome to the Vagina!’.” Reading this book is like being at a party when a truly smart and funny person walks through the door. “Thank goodness she’s here,” you think, “Now we’ll have some fun.”
- Deborah Bogen, author of Landscape With Silos, winner of the X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize (Texas Review Press, 2005)
This necessary book comes to us straight from “the kitchen of the soul,” where the details of daily life–a sick dog’s diet, an inflatable church up for bidding on eBay-are transformed from the domestic into the mythic. Cati Porter’s fascination with language and deeply-felt passion are seasoned with a welcome humor that makes this book a joy to read. Admirable in its range–whether pantoum, sestina, abecedarium, or deft free verse–and penetrating in its wisdom, Seven Floors Up is a collection to be treasured.
- Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Unmentionables (W. W. Norton, 2008 )
