simple constructs for the lizzies
by Lisa Cattrone
$16.00 | April 2016
Lisa Cattrone dazzles with these investigations of form, plying her linguistic materials until they give out and reveal the something even newer at the core of the new. This work ascends and descends, too, rising like thrown confetti, sinking, then, but still shining with complex softness underfoot. Nothing happens once in “Simple Constructs for Lizzies,” and nothing Cattrone constructs is as simple as the same old thing all over again. These are the logics of Heraclitus set in argyle delicacy, funny, too, and biting from the heart.
– Anne Boyer
Cattrone’s poems are embedded with questions that hit the reset button to intelligence. One slips into an eternal return, a cycle of psychic life, an internal landscape that feels alien yet personally and recognizably visceral. Something is pulled into you as you are pulled inside-out. There are moments effected of absolute clarity, not due to narrative logic but in the precipitation of crystalline intelligence through a mixed solution of varying modes of anxiety, vulnerability, and compulsion. History’s negative is perhaps the reverse of the sun. It inverts. The centerfold of reproduction/motherhood undefines language and being by touching the insides together.
-Feng Sun Chen
About the Author
Lisa Cattrone is a mother and high school teacher living in California. She received her BA in Philosophy and MFA in poetry from Saint Mary’s College of California. Her poetry and essays have appeared in various journals including The Chicago Review, The Awl, The Volta, Lemon Hound, Gulf Coast, The Claudius App, Denver Quarterly, Volt, Interim, Fourteen Hills and West Wind Review, among many others. Her chapbooks Mutations for Jenny and My Secret Life were both published by Horse Less Press.