Thicket

by Cate Peebles

Selected by Eric Baus and Andrea Rexilius for the 2017 Besmilr Brigham award.

Cate Peebles' debut book of poems, THICKET, is deft and ideal in its pertinence to our current moment while also reaching both back and beyond itself. In the long poem, "The Woodlands," Peebles writes: "When the flood comes / we will be on our phones / searching for how / to save ourselves from / the flood." The sigh of recognition, of "so true," will be a constant companion for readers of THICKET. Peebles considers the female figure in the world in this #MeToo moment.

"What a masterful, mysterious first book. I love these poems for their totally clear, dream-like permeability. I am particularly blown away by the long poem that anchors the book, 'The Woodlands,' which has an extraordinary, tender wildness: it reminds me of my favorite surrealist novels, while also managing somehow to be deeply personal. I look forward to reading these poems, again and again, with growing admiration and joy."—Matthew Zapruder

Genres: Poetry

75 pages, Paperback

Published July 15, 2018

Reviews

[Cynthia Arrieu-King]

This book does a lot of ambitious things and succeeds: takes history and weaves it into the spaces of living moment to moment today, takes the idea of bramble and hiding, love, cohabitation, city life, witness and decay (of animals, violence). Peebles stacks lines with a collage aesthetic, a veering cobbling together of things into something new and teeming rather than something confusing that dies under its own weight. Each line jumps if you read slowly. Towards the back a few poems might have lost me a bit, but then the last two or three poems solidly land a seemless, handless slight of hand.

[Dayeton Tolle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cate Peebles does something remarkable in this work of poetry: lean into an ambitious and creative task. It’s one thing to take a chance in prose, it’s another to take chances in rhetoric, style, and structure while remaining cohesive from start to finish in just a few lines. Weaving moments of withering and decay (in both human and animal form), nodding to history, city life, love, and the absence of love, and violence, she somehow ties all six in a mesmerizing way. I didn’t want this work to end—which is why I forced myself to marinade with the words for longer than usual.