“The Stranger Manual reminds us that even
as poetry mines the dire circumstances of physical being, its zigzag hungers
and outcries, its methods constantly swerve towards celebration. Catie
Rosemurgy’s penetrating meditative force is fueled by a feral play and we can’t
help but be swept up in its ricocheting humor, riptide imagination, and
mordant, sensual thrill. Reader, prepare for a scorching.”
THE RAUCOUS, FUNNY, AND SMART NEW POETRY COLLECTION BY CATIE ROSEMURGY,
AUTHOR OF MY FAVORITE APOCALYPSE
Make sure you have
a home. You’re going to want
to hurt yourself a
little inside of something you own.
—from “Read This When You Are
Sad”
“Catie Rosemurgy’s verse traverses many emotional
registers in The Stranger Manual, her chatty and intimate second
collection.”
—BOOKFORUM
"In The Stranger Manual Catie Rosemurgy invents a new voice for a new time. Inventive, but eerily familiar, the riddles and surprising images in these poems sneak up on the reader in their beauty and terror. There is an elaborate, compulsive ascension to the music and meaning as themes and rhythms are repeated, and changed, as in no book I remember reading. The Passion of the lyrics turns meditative in an instant as the heart and the eye move across the pages with the poet. Rosemurgy is an important voice, and this is a groundbreaking book."
—LAURA KASISCHKE
Catie
Rosemurgy’s second collection, The
Stranger Manual, is a wild rush across the American grain. Many of the
poems follow an unlikely character named Miss Peach, an unpredictable,
cartoonish shaper-shifter, who emerges onto the page dragging the myth of the
individual, various gender scripts, and the grand tradition of the poetic
persona along with her. She becomes an outsider, a hero, an intruder, a rock
star. The town around her, Gold River, is also always in flux—part center and
part mirage. The Stranger Manual celebrates
the fractious nature of self and society in poems that are fabulist,
speculative, raucous, and alluring.
“[Miss Peach’s] self-flagellating
confessions—which are often wordy and prose-like—amusingly, and beautifully,
bear the burden of off-center insight that is the result of experience and
pain.”
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
PRAISE FOR CATIE ROSEMURGY:
“Rosemurgy’s
poetry hearkens back to the high-moderns and taps into a ferocity typified by
Sexton and Plath as well as such intelligent women rockers as Liz Phair or PJ
Harvey.”
—AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW
“Catie Rosemurgy is best when she speaks
outright. ‘Show don’t tell,’ goes the old mandate, but Rosemurgy understands the
power of telling directly. [In My
Favorite Apocalypse], she does so with a clear, authentic, compelling
voice.”
