Gin & Bleach

by Catherine Wing

"My Reptile"

Little frilléd lizard

with your big mouth
and your clutch of egg.
Pure urge iguana
—I wanna wanna
wanna—heavy pet
in a moist habitat.
Your dewlap licks
down my spine;
your creep yearns,
yearns your crawl,
like a small machine
that you rev and
rev and rev until
the engine floods.

Gin and bleach: two clear liquids aiming for purity, bordering the toxic. Catherine Wing's poems are soaked in her cocktail, mixing doubt, loneliness, rough elbows, and razor focus. It riddles, aiming askew for a straight answer: how do we make our way through this world?

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

First published July 17, 2012

Reviews

[Melissa Barrett · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great book, dense with sound, rhyme, and wordplay. I'd like to memorize a dozen of the poems in this book. 5 stars for a very unique style.

Here are some favorite lines:

"Let's say / you're the sort / who puts out / too much ink."

"Affixed, / riveted, and set. Readyness's ready."

"o swoon / so sure, your bright-me-out, your leap-me-up-and-far / but I am brittle, broken but a little"

"But moving towards / and towards-er"

"Language is, at best, a guessing game, / wherein my pen's a rock, a fool, a gist, / trying like a tinsel pickaxe to persist."

"taking the grain of an idea and gnashing it against some grammar"

"You burn my sun. Your south. My soon. Your should. My ought. But no, no, no, our oughts should not."

"And if he her post-colonialism, / then she was post his coronet-colonel."

"Instamatically Jerry's sold in a single glance--or was it glands?"

"There's no moon set / to permanent wax; the sought- / after afterwards sours. / So go the hours."

"Four--ever--or / until ever's over"

"Ridden and sudden, she's a knot at the end / of a noose."

"You can't refuse the guillotine, its smooth / discovery, dis-easing you into a world of tremble and surge."

"I'm more like the rain on the King's / parade, a Visigoth waiting for the sack, / half a man in a fancy hat, a jewel box / with a stone door, doubtful / diamond, wrecked form."

"What bird now / will build my wings / and learn me how to walk?"

[Keith Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poems filled with wordplay, rhyme--sometimes natural, sometimes internal, sometimes intentionally forced--assumed forms, invented forms, occasional twisted syntax, wit, and even, from time to time, a hint of despair. Although it feels very personal, sometimes, there is none of the intentional (invented?) vulnerability that shapes so much of our current poetics. Here's the last stanza from "Your Other Other," one of the few poems that goes longer than a page, and one of those that feels personal. Yet you can see the language playfulness, and something of the way she pushes syntax (although this poem is more direct than most):

I guess I'm not the reina
to your ray of sun anymore.
I'm more like the rain on the King's
parade, a Visigoth waiting for the sack,
half a man in a fancy hat, a jewel box
with a stone door, doubtful
diamond, wrecked form. This queen
has lost her anchor and her
anchor stalk. What bird now
will build my wings
and learn me now to walk?