Streetlamp Nautilus

"Catharine Batsios is a brilliant observer of broken and discarded things, which, being from Flint and Detroit, is a blessing. Streetlamp Nautilus is filled with decay, but a type of decay that creates its own light. The streets in these poems only seem vacant if you don't know how to look. In reality, they are teeming with life and afterlife, including haunted objects, memories, and living things who prefer the shadows. Under Batsios' careful watch, the slightest gesture (unnoticed by most) is worthy of a Greek tragedy. A piece of fruit can be an act of love, even if its pleasures are fleeting. A blazing first book from a Michigan poet to watch."

-Christine Kanownik, author of Head and Blood Bath

"Cat Batsios is that rare rustbelt poet who writes against nostalgia. She loves the places she's from, namely Flint and Detroit, but she doesn't romanticize the mechanized industrial work those towns are known for. Our inheritance, these poems argue, is a shared humanity, not a set of prescribed tasks that leave us spiritually, civically, and ecologically bereft. Who else could empathize with the plights of Sisyphus, Atlas, and Prometheus while sleeping on the back bench of a beat-up Buick between shifts at the family restaurant and reading Sophocles by flashlight?

From the kitchen to the basement, / there are 26 steps / one for each letter of the Latin alphabet /24 for Greek / if you skip the two that are rotting, she writes. Batsios moves her words around the page like an '82 Century weaving in and out of lanes on I-475, or like Olson's hangnail stanzas in Maximus. It's the kind of unromantic, place-based projective verse we've been awaiting quite a while, and she's only getting started."

-Cal Freeman, author of The Weather of Our Names

"Catharine Batsios's poems verb down the street, where the pavement is strung like a strand of prayer flags, unveiling our cities in a new light, a signature Streetlamp Nautilus darkness. There is caffeine in the coffee, a poet in the poetry. Not the silence of the 3am coffee-jitters, but the sound. Listen up, reader. We're alive. Or something much fleshier, rockier, viscous, winged. Something I'm grateful this poet shaped into seeing."

-Elijah Sparkman, author of Five Stories