Overview

Cate McGowan's full-length poetry collection Sacrificial Steel uses art, history, and complex, musical poetic lines and forms to explore the biggest question we have as humans: what does it all mean? McGowan utilizes form, precision, braiding, and sound to capture the essence of contemporary lyric poetry. This collection is both tightly structured and expansive, covering subjects both personal (like grief and marriage) and political (American politics and ecological concerns). It also contains many ekphrastic poems. McGowan's voice is singular in the way it blends research and the vernacular. These poems are full of feminist wisdom and humor but ultimately explore the nature of existence in a declining world. This book captures place well, with a particular focus on the South and Florida. In this collection, nature and the animal world are juxtaposed with human endeavors and frailty. Sacrificial Steel, winner of Driftwood Press's Editors' Pick Prize, is about what humanity builds and what it destroys. It is for fans of lyric poetry, art, and music, and for anyone trying to find meaning in the chaos of history.

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9781949065350

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Reviews

""Poetry cannot best death. But poetry can make the best of it. 'I need an answer. There are no answers, ' wisely writes Mitchell Untch. This talented poet pens a thesaurus of longing with his first book. His lyrics multiply with the nuances of loss: mainly the speaker's twin from AIDS, but also the loss of a platonic Midwestern girlfriend-I've never read of this kind of unseen love in a more definitive manner.... Editors were 'floored' by these poems. Little wonder. Reader, be floored."" -Spencer Reece, selected by Louise Glück as winner of the Bakeless Prize, for The Clerks Tale ""The focus of Mitchell Untch's stunning debut collection, Memorial with Liminal Space, pivots on leaving, leaving behind, having left, the undiscovered treasure or detritus. With gorgeous imagery, the poet searches for answers where there are none available-in nurses' stations, carnival booths, bodies of lovers, the past. Even Ronnie and Nancy Reagan, turn away in 1980's AID's pandemic blindness. Too much pain. Too much exquisite pain. As he writes in Better Angels II, No one was listening, and we had become fewer and less, / voices like brooms over sidewalks. If reason needs to find its way, the poems in Memorial with Liminal Space unearth a hidden pathway within. El Dorado. Atlantis. Shangri La. Eden."" -Laurel Ann Bogen, author of The Misread City andwinner of the Academy of American Poets Award ""The gorgeous and moving poems of Mitchell Untch's Memorial with Liminal Space begin by looking back unflinchingly at the suffering and death of his twin brother from the HIV virus. We follow this poet as he laments through the 'corridors of grief.' And as he continues to journey into rooms and scenes from his past, he discovers he can cast a new, prismatic light on those dark moments, turning despair into grace and beauty. Mitchell Untch demonstrates, with his attentiveness to sensual details, how much there is to celebrate and sing: 'the hummingbird's / bright delving, a wakefulness that / cannot be described except that / it lives.'"" -Molly Bendall, author of Watchful

""Sacrificial Steel is a stunning debut collection, bright as a lighthouse flashing into the dark. These poems hide from nothing, illuminating truths about both the vicious and beautiful possibilities of our world. They embody the sublime and are breathtaking in their precise candor."" - Erica Wright, author of All the Bayou Stories End with Drowned""A wonderful addition to contemporary poetry, Cate McGowan's Sacrificial Steel cuts lyric vision with punk swagger and mordant humor to examine womanhood, history, family, ecological disaster, and Southern identity. I am gobsmacked by the precision and restraint that characterize these impeccable poems-every syllable, every character, every space. Like her contemporaries, feminist poets Cynthia Cruz and Aracelis Girmay, McGowan possesses a fine intelligence that is matched only by her conscience. These poems affirm that it is now, as it has been, the poet's work to 'clock the universe's massacres, dark / soffits, underhanded sky.'"" - Carolyn Hembree, author of For Today

Author Information

Cate McGowan is an artist, critic, historian, and the author of three books. Her collection of memoir essays, Writing is Revision, will be published by De Gruyter Brill in 2024, and her novel, These Lowly Objects, appeared with Gold Wake Press in 2020. McGowan's short story collection, True Places Never Are, won the Moon City Press Short Fiction Award in 2014 and was a finalist for the Lascaux Prize. Cate's poetry, essays, and stories have appeared in numerous literary outlets, including Norton's Flash Fiction International, Glimmer Train, The North American Review, Stonecoast Review, Chestnut Review, Shenandoah, Citron Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Tahoma Literary Review. Professor McGowan (known as McG to her students) holds an M.F.A. and Ph.D. and is currently pursuing another advanced degree at Johns Hopkins University. She regards teaching as her lifeblood and lives in Florida with her husband and animal family, but remains deeply connected to her progressive Southern roots in Atlanta, Georgia. Sara Moore Wagner is the author of three prize winning full length books of poetry, Lady Wing Shot, winner of the 2023 Blue Lynx Prize (2024), Swan Wife (Cider Press Review Editors Prize, 2022), and Hillbilly Madonna (Driftwood Press, 2022), and of two chapbooks, Tumbling After (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2022) and Hooked Through (2017). She is also a 2022 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award recipient, a 2021 National Poetry Series Finalist, and the recipient of a 2019 Sustainable Arts Foundation award. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals and anthologies including Gulf Coast, Smartish Pace, Waxwing, Beloit Poetry Journal, and North American Review, among others. In 2023, she became the Managing Poetry Editor of Driftwood Press.

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