Overview

In The Catastrophes, Marie Scarles excavates the legacies of the lands she lives with and on, describing the beauty and brutality of abandoned factories, highway-side wildflowers, and toxic rivers. Mapping catastrophe's traces from breakfast eggs to late-night shifts at the bar, this collection asks: in a time of destruction, what can be cultivated from the ruin?

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Reviews

These remarkable poems look ""across the past's vast valley"" to take careful inventory-who and what has been forgotten? Mothers and children, marshes and forests, men and scrapyards. They unbury the body-stories hidden in the land, in personal and collective memory, but they do not forget the violet buds and cups of coffee-the daily rhythms that make a life. From train tracks and crop circles, from chronic pain and thunder, from poisoned air and the ache of a twelve-hour shift, these poems arrive like asters sprouting from concrete. With her brave seeing and listening, Marie Scarles offers us a different path forward-""a real chance at living""-from the filth and rust. -Raisa Tolchinsky Marie Scarles invokes the open and determined descriptive commitment of Elizabeth Bishop as well as the jaggedly energetic industrial assemblage of Hart Crane. This brief collection orchestrates a spectrum of textures from mournfulness to tenderness to terror to quiet defiance, each poem revealing a seam between the catastrophic and the compassionate. One illusion of ruin is that a woman with her own catastrophes can't rise up to look at the world that shaped her, nor dare to immerse herself in place and remember. The Catastrophes is a refutation of that illusion, and more impressively, it bears witness to the body as landscape, landscape as body, the language of these landscapes as a language of love. -Patrick Rosal

Author Information

Marie Scarles is a writer, maker, and movement worker from the marshlands of Mystic, Connecticut. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

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