Poets Square
A memoir in thirty feral cats
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
People kept asking: Why would you have cats that don’t love you back?
The morning after Courtney Gustafson moved into an old house in the Poets Square neighbourhood of Tucson, Arizona, she noticed tiny pawprints all over her driveway. They were the first evidence of a colony of feral cats who would, in time, become part of her family and help pierce a personal darkness she’d wrestled with for much of her life.
Beebs was the first cat to appear, allowing herself to be petted in the driveway. And then came so many others. There was Monkey, the hissing, dark-blotched calico, and Reverse Monkey, her timid, white-blotched opposite. There were Sad Boy and Lola, the inseparable pair who made their way across the internet and into strangers’ wedding vows. There was the sweet, serene Dr. Big Butt, who brought lessons about grief. And there was Goldie, the tiny king of Poets Square: sick, skinny, but completely unafraid. These cats – and many, many others – would expand her world spectacularly.
Poets Square is a love letter to community in a broken society, told through the cats Courtney meets in dark alleys, neglected homes and her own driveway; cats she cherishes and must sometimes let go. Above all, she explores what her encounters with feral cats can teach us about care, connectedness and the power
of hope.
‘Cats are mystical beings, bridging the spiritual and the tangible. Courtney Gustafson’s Poet Square is a book that helps us connect to this spiritual world, offering a bridge to the ethereal’ Ai Weiwei
‘Courtney Gustafson writes with uncommon grace about the castoff, the abandoned, the invisible. This book should be read and treasured for its ability to make the reader more human and humane’ Lauren Slater, author of Blue Dreams
‘Deftly intertwined with the individual stories of all these cats is her own story of how she got there … She is clear-eyed about the deviation of her life’ Esther Walker, The Spike
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Gustafson's tender debut details how she came to care for a colony of feral cats in Tucson, Ariz. Gustafson, who grew up "loving cats so much that I often pretended to be one," and her boyfriend, Tim, moved into a small house in Tucson's Poets Square neighborhood in 2020. After her first night there, she noticed and began naming a collection of cats who circled the property, realizing "right away it would consume me." She decided to launch an Instagram account focused on the animals, initially as a means of keeping in touch with her father, who lived on the other side of the country. As the account's popularity grew, however, Gustafson came to realize that, after having many of her academic and professional achievements chalked up to her conventional beauty, she craved the "attention and praise for something that I could be certain was wholly unrelated to my looks." While navigating her sudden online fame during the Covid pandemic, Gustafson began to notice how much easier it was for strangers to express concern for the cats—including ringleader Goldie and friendly Dr. Big Butt—than their struggling human neighbors. Such insights elevate the proceedings beyond a collection of diverting diary entries. One need not be a cat person to be enchanted by this. Illus.
