Overview

Home to My Cats by Adam Crothers is a fizzing, formally playful pamphlet that turns feline devotion into a poetics of art, music and mischief. These poems move between lyric address and ekphrasis, riffing on Louise Bourgeois, Franz Marc, Takashi Murakami, Louis Wain, and Arthur Rackham, while also letting Taylor Swift and Leonard Cohen wander into the cat's-eye frame. Crothers writes with a quick, punning intelligence and a gift for the compressed song, where philosophy slides into litter-tray comedy, and tenderness is sharpened by wit. Beneath the surface-level glee sits a serious enquiry into attention, companionship and belief, as the cats become both muse and measure, their small tyrannies and private theologies remaking the home into a site of lyric necessity.

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9781917617772

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Reviews

Home to My Cats is deliciously strange and sincere, celebrating cats in all their tender/violent contradictions. Crothers commits to his subject without irony, like a cat stalking a toy with the ferocity needed to fell a rat. Unlike Eliot's ranging jellicle ensemble, Crothers gives us just two cats to track, each of whom contains multitudes: Harriet and Marlowe trot between worlds, shapeshifting into spies, pets and little household gods, described by dancing, frisking language: words merge and warp, snuggling meowlogisms alongside nods to Christopher Smart's Jubilate Agno, while rhymes blend, blur and contrast like pigments on a coat (the staccato of a Bengal's spots, the repeated swipes of a tabby's stripes). The reader stops and starts like a shrew below a lifted paw, waiting (and perhaps hoping) for it to clap back down. - Kirsten Irving This collection shows us once again that cats bring out the best in people. Not by being better than people - I'm fairly sure I won't be eaten by my children if I die unacknowledged at home one day - but by being open, in a way at once alien and domestic, to our thoughts and intentions. From Louis Wain to Louise Bourgeois via the litter box, Crothers responds to and reflects on cats - his own and other artists' - in ways that are new and always surprising. An anagram of Adam Crothers is ""arm cats' horde"" this beautiful and sensitive set of poems may be setting us up for the forthcoming invasion. I for one welcome our new feline overlords. - James Womack

Author Information

Adam Crothers was born in Belfast in 1984, and lives in Cambridge, where he works as a librarian and academic supervisor and is a Bye-Fellow of Girton College. He is the author of Several Deer (Carcanet, 2016; winner of the Shine/Strong Poetry Award and the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize) and The Culture of My Stuff (Carcanet, 2020).

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