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Captiva
“Andrew Ketcham’s CAPTIVA had me in a chokehold begging for more. A deviantly crafted collection that commands your attention.”
— Ryan Fitzgibbon
Founder, EIC “Hello Mr.” ,
“A Great Gay Book” (ABRAMS 2024)
“With a brutal, dark sensuality, this collection of poems traces the path of a hurricane from harm to repair, the wounded and wounding narrator, a young man for whom love is “a language lost along the way,” uses words like weapons to excavate himself and interrogate his desires. Visceral and haunting, Ketcham’s writing evokes terror, danger, beauty, and self-sabotage, each poem like a gasp of air amid the suffocating synesthesia of drowning. Within the wet, stormy weather of these poems, many taking place in the South, with its “hometowns swallowed up by water,” bodies are also a type of topography, a site of trauma, of thresholds crossed. When Ketcham writes, everything spills out, red and revealing. Here, writing is an “enema of things better kept inside”: the dangerous men, the boyfriend’s boyfriends, guns, highways, bruises, boots, bipolar disorder. Yet this is ultimately a book about wanting to survive, about coming back from the brink, the poems imploring the lover, the reader, the “Put your mouth to mine.” Press your own mouth against these words. You will survive.”
— Kristin Sanders
“CUNTRY” (Trembling Pillow Press) “The Science of Women Getting Rich”
“The world of Andrew Ketcham's poetry is both familiar and alien; electric and narcotic. His debut Captiva is populated with tragic lovers, pet rats, and at least in one instance, Marianne Williamson. Ketcham creates scenes in a few lines that are so real you can feel them in your mouth and often finishes poems with a final lyric that lands with earthshaking resonance. It's a rare thing for art to be this vulnerable and yet so fearless.”
— Kyle Seibel
American author
— Ryan Fitzgibbon
Founder, EIC “Hello Mr.” ,
“A Great Gay Book” (ABRAMS 2024)
“With a brutal, dark sensuality, this collection of poems traces the path of a hurricane from harm to repair, the wounded and wounding narrator, a young man for whom love is “a language lost along the way,” uses words like weapons to excavate himself and interrogate his desires. Visceral and haunting, Ketcham’s writing evokes terror, danger, beauty, and self-sabotage, each poem like a gasp of air amid the suffocating synesthesia of drowning. Within the wet, stormy weather of these poems, many taking place in the South, with its “hometowns swallowed up by water,” bodies are also a type of topography, a site of trauma, of thresholds crossed. When Ketcham writes, everything spills out, red and revealing. Here, writing is an “enema of things better kept inside”: the dangerous men, the boyfriend’s boyfriends, guns, highways, bruises, boots, bipolar disorder. Yet this is ultimately a book about wanting to survive, about coming back from the brink, the poems imploring the lover, the reader, the “Put your mouth to mine.” Press your own mouth against these words. You will survive.”
— Kristin Sanders
“CUNTRY” (Trembling Pillow Press) “The Science of Women Getting Rich”
“The world of Andrew Ketcham's poetry is both familiar and alien; electric and narcotic. His debut Captiva is populated with tragic lovers, pet rats, and at least in one instance, Marianne Williamson. Ketcham creates scenes in a few lines that are so real you can feel them in your mouth and often finishes poems with a final lyric that lands with earthshaking resonance. It's a rare thing for art to be this vulnerable and yet so fearless.”
— Kyle Seibel
American author
86 pages, Paperback
Published February 12, 2024
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