American Faith
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
The ultimate subject of Maya Catherine’s stunning debut collection is violence. American Faith begins with its manifestation in our country: a destructive administration, a history of cruelty and extermination, and a love of firearms. “He owns a gun farm in Florida/they grow in swamps like chestnuts.” The poet introduces a suite of poems that precisely imagines the consequences, a series of “cancellations”—of government, bees, the color wheel, the return to nature, and the end of the world. The violence naturally extends to the personal. The speaker’s Romanian grandfather keeps wild dogs in case a man tries to steal his daughters. A godmother is psychologically erased by her tempestuous husband, who is nevertheless generous to flowers. “It’s what happened inside her/that slouched.” And what for some is routine can feel like an assault: a TSA agent wipes down a bra tucked in a traveler’s suitcase, adding, “prettiest terrorist I’ve seen all day.” Tentatively, the title poem casts light on the unexplored future, a solution that includes faith: “…the days, impatient, fresh beasts, appeal to me—You are here. You must believe in something.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The poised debut from PW poetry reviews editor Popa is a book about the things and people such as a boy from summer camp who was beaten to death by his mother that "No logic, no language will bring... back." These carefully tuned poems dramatize a classical sensibility shaken awake by the ceaseless shock waves of Trump's America, where "The season turns over/ with perfect indifference," and even "The Bees," as the title of one prose poem claims, "Have Been Cancelled." How, the poems wonder, can one come to terms with the realities of this dark moment but through understated irony: "The principle of the gun law is that anyone/ should have the right to buy what may kill/ a room full of people this failure is freedom.// I'm sorry there can't be more poetry in this." Child of immigrants, teacher, woman in a vulnerable body, the speakers of Popa's poems seek to set the record straight, knowing how little anyone listens to poetry, of course, but to other people in general. "I want a kind of betterness./ Want it desperately. Is that faith?" she asks. There are no good answers to questions like this, which it is the job of poetry to ask. Popa's questing and questioning lyric poems are kind company amid the uncertainty of the modern world.
